An indoor positioning system (IPS) is a system of hardware and software implemented to facilitate positioning in an indoor environment the same way satellite navigation (like GPS) does in the general outdoors environment.
Positioning – the process of calculating the position of an object in a defined space – is the essential starting point of many processes necessary for automation.
- • Navigation
- • Traffic/spacing control
- • Automated inventory management
- • Automated guidance
- • Automated traffic logging
But why choose to implement a dedicated IPS technology when freely available GNSS (like GPS, NavIC) and cell tower-based tracking (SuperGPS) are available? Two main reasons:
- 1. Accuracy
- 2. Ability to track ‘dumb’ objects with much lower cost
Accuracy
GPS advertises that it can accurately determine the position of an object to 0.1m, Galileo (EU’s GNSS) can do it to 0.01m – but these are on their encrypted channels, i.e., only for government or military use. To the public, the accuracy advertised is 1m to 3.6m.
This reported accuracy is further applicable only in ideal conditions. Simply go into a mall or an airport, and you’ll find your possible location circle has grown to the size of the building itself. In some cases, you may not even be able to see your position.
Even if your mobile device was accurate to a meter, it is not enough for indoor applications. In malls you could easily miss a shop entrance. In museums you might be looking at an entirely different artifact. The actual package you need to retrieve inside your warehouse might be two or three boxes away from where the system reports it.
Our transceivers eliminate this environmental noise and obstructions by virtue of being inside buildings, and additionally benefit from all the error correction already applied to GNSS to make them as accurate as they are.
Versatility
By virtue of how GNSSs work, any object that needs to be tracked by a system needs to use some form of wireless communication to actively report its position. This is because (to the public at the least) the satellites used in GNSSs are only transmitters, they cannot receive.
In our IPS, our beacons are transceivers. They can both send out (transmit) signals by which smart devices such as mobile phones or self-driving robots can calculate their own position. They can also receive signals from tags blindly transmitting their ID to calculate the position of those tags.
This means that those tags do not need advanced computation capabilities to calculate position, or additional hardware to transmit their position to the central system. This drastically reduces the cost and maintenance of the tracker tags. After all, the box to be retrieved from shelf X, row Y does not need to know it is at that position, only the person retrieving it needs to know.
Product statement
The aim of the product is to facilitate positioning in indoor spaces with accuracies greater than can be found with conventional techniques used for outdoor purposes.
