One of the great benefits of IndoorAtlas for its customers is that with sensor fusion they don’t need a dense AP or beacon setup to benefit from our typical 2m to 5m positioning accuracy. However, sometimes customers ask: “Can we have an even more accurate position on this important area?”
To this end, since SDK 3.5, IndoorAtlas has built-in Low Power Beacon Fusion. This feature allows our customers to, at the same time, benefit from cost efficient deployment with sparse radio infrastructure and increased accuracy in some use cases, for example
- Cold-starting positioning from inside a room; More accurate first fix.
- Detecting dwelling inside a room; e.g. meeting participants detected inside a meeting room or detecting a patient dwelling inside a clinic room.
To use the feature, beacon(s) is set up to transmit at a low power (typically -20dBm to -40dBm) and is marked in IndoorAtlas Beacon Planner as a Low Power Beacon. This makes IndoorAtlas sensor fusion treat it differently from other radio signal sources – namely allowing position estimates to converge to the location of the beacon, when the signal of the beacon is reliably heard. IndoorAtlas SDK handles this under the hood and the application receives position estimates normally. Note also that this feature can be combined with our Geofencing feature, to get high accuracy enter/exit events.
In the below image:
- Blue markers depict normal beacons
- Red marker depicts a beacon configured to low transmission power
- The checked checkbox with green rectangle means this beacon is configured as Low Power beacon
On the below floor plan, IndoorAtlas SDK behaves so that when a user sits at the meeting room desk (red marker), the position of the user is placed exactly on top of the red marker. When the user leaves the vicinity of the table, positioning continues normally, like there was no low power beacon at all.
Here's another example in a clinic setting, to detect patient entering a dwelling inside a room during the hospital visit.
The dark green beacons represent low power beacons (red beacon is the currently selected beacon in Beacon Planner).
The blue beacons are normal beacons deployed sparsely in the corridors and lobbies to allow indoor positioning navigation to the patient rooms.
