From zero to hero - taking indoor positioning mainstream

For years now, academic research in the field of indoor positioning has resembled a bustling marketplace of ideas, where every researcher presents their new technique with boisterous enthusiasm. The promise of ubiquitous indoor positioning, however, always seems like it’s at least 12 months away. Why is this?

The focus of research far too often is the latest numerical technique at the expense of addressing the real problems to be solved. Hard practical problems such as deployability, scalability and real-world applicability. At Crowd Connected we aimed to deliver a system that can be set up and ‘just works’ within hours, not days or weeks.

Routinely we install hundreds and even thousands of beacons into challenging, temporary environments such as exhibitions, with small teams, in hours, the day before an event. Prioritizing for these design considerations has led to a different, unique solution. How did we get here? Early on we decided that ‘fingerprinting’ had to be abandoned. Obviously surveying every square meter of the navigable footprint with a mobile test app doesn’t scale for anything larger than a test site. Imagine walking up and down every corridor of eight floors of a major hospital unit to collect a radio map of the environment, only for it to be rendered useless with the addition of new infrastructure or the movement of furniture, such as beds!

We noticed that the market was short of a robust, zero calibration solution. None of the existing solutions were capable of delivering in temporary events, which are the most difficult environments for most positioning systems. So we went away and built a solution from scratch.

Fusing bluetooth signals from beacons with sensor data from the smartphone is the core of our technology. This approach enables us to use inexpensive and readily available commodity hardware (beacons and regular smartphones) and established protocols (e.g. iBeacon) making the solution cost effective. The positioning algorithm is conceptually simple. An absolute position on a map can be derived from the beacon signals (the beacons have known and fixed positions) and the accuracy of this is enhanced using accelerometer sensor data from the smartphone, which can’t give an absolute position on its own. Our special ingredient involves a unique method for calculating positions. We transform many Bluetooth observations within a time window using the accelerometer sensor data. This approach allows us to compensate for movement, and therefore incorporate many more observations into the calculation of a single position, reducing noise and leading to robust, accurate positions.

Fast forward to the present day with hundreds of event deployments now under our belt, our solution has become proven and trusted. Our mobile SDK has been installed on 8 million phones. Each week we do 2-3 beacon installs around the globe. We are now working with mapping providers to serve large building complexes, already deployed in a number of university campuses and hospitals around the world. As more building managers recognise the productivity gains of their users finding their way, we look forward to playing our part in making indoor positioning ubiquitous.