Improvement of indoor localization

Abstract

Positioning system is a system that helps in finding the location of a person or object in space. Global Positioning System or GPS was started in 1973 to overcome old positioning system [1]. Today, GPS has become the reference for Outdoor positioning system where a direct uplink between the GPS satellite and a receiver device could be established. Whereas, inside a building, where the GPS signal is bad or unavailable, the estimation using this method has a high level of error. Considering human spends most of his time indoors, it would be necessary to build a system that can help to determine the position in these environments. The target of this thesis is to find the ideal method for indoor positioning system with lower percentage of error. In this thesis, a wireless network is implemented using four sensor of a smart phone. In a wireless network, three methods can be used to estimate the location of an object. The technique used in this thesis is based on the Received Signal Strength to estimate the indoor position given that is the simplest method and the less expensive one. In addition, two experiments are done using the new method, wireless network with smart phone sensors. Since the hardware required for the implementation of a real sensor network is not available, a Matlab simulation is done and it is shown that the percentage of error decreases comparing to previous methods.