I would like to locate the iPhone in a building to build an application with similar features as the iPhone app of the American Museum of Natural History. There is no good GPS reception as there are also rooms in the cellar I would like to cover.
What can save me is that there is good wifi coverage in the whole area, so my idea was to triangulate the position based on the wifi base stations in range, whose positions are known. However I found no public API to find out which base stations are in range.
Questions
Do you have an idea how the app mentioned above manages to get the correct location indoors?
Could one add the wifi base stations manually to Apple's database and use the usual CoreLocation?
Do you have other ideas how to implement it?
Any help is very much appreciated!
Boundary conditions
The indoor navigation is only used during an event to guide guests new to the building, so no complex infrastructure should be installed.
There are approximately 14-18 rooms to be covered. They are in different parts of the building, so wiring everything up would be very costly.
The preferred solution would not require a server backend of any kind and would work with a list of wifi access points and their corresponding locations.
I wouldn't know about 1 and 2. But if you would implement such a thing, turn it around to save a lot of trouble: create your own free-of-charge wifi network, and let the network determine the location, either based on triangulation, or just based on the currently associated access point. Make their signal weak so you have one audible access point per room. Let the app ask a server in what room he appears to be. This will also work for any other mobile/pda/laptop.
As for other ideas: You could use bluetooth to do somewhat the same as you're planning for wifi. You can't do everything with bluetooth, but listing devices seems to be one possibility. So just put a bluetooth device in every room. Bluetooth range is limited by definition.
Another one would be to use the microphone in conjunction with a high pitched sound which identifies the room, but that would cause trouble with dogs (for blind people), attract bats, and repel mice at the same time. Better focus on an RF based solution ;-)
You can also check out Navizon's indoor positioning system:
http://www.navizon.com/product-navizon-indoor-triangulation-system
Their system is able to locate iPhones by using the WiFi signals transmitted by the device and doesn't require an app to run on the phone to locate it. It can locate any other WiFi enabled device for that matter.
Check out wirelesswerx.com They seem to be doing indoor location using Bluetooth and it looks like they can do permanent install or temporary for events.
Related
I have been trying to use bing maps API's function getCurrentPosition from a mobile device via 3G internet. I was expecting the Samsung SIII, being a high spec device, to work without any problems.
However when the mobile connects over WiFi I am able to get my location whereas when I switch the connection to 3G I do not get my actual location.
The pushpin does point to my house but as I move away from it, it does not react to my position. It's like getting the location of the server hosting the function (which is my computer at my house).
The GPS is on and correctly set on the mobile too.
Moreover, the getCurrentPosition is inside a recursive loop which invokes it every 500ms.
Now I know for sure that bing maps API works mobile devices since I have been involved in a Vodafone organized treasure hunt using tablets. Please guide me to solve my issue.
Thanks,
Justin
The positioning service is directly related to the device and its own implementation to find the position assumed by and from the various method that was used to find the best matching. It does not seem to be directly related to Bing API in this specific case.
In order to improve positioning speed and precision, the different systems can switch to Wifi-Positioning to other method like A-GPS or even cell identification.
If you try to get the information about your position based on your wifi, on Android, we can easily assume that it will used the Wifi-cell as the position that means that the known location would be the one retrieve from various crowdsourced information from your own devices and also others. That said, in WiFi, you will not be moving, you are connected to the Wifi cell without any other information.
If you cannot get your position in 3G, try to go outside so it can use the most precise positioning method (A-GPS) as it appears that phone cell-id is not working in your area.
I'm developing navigation system for my university as some kind of research activity. I'm using SVGKit to display floor plans. And now I need to provide user locationing service for navigation and tracking. So here's my questions:
1) Do I need some special hardware installed in university (Cisco MSE for example, or some cheaper analogues), or I can apply some software/technologies to our current hardware for server-side user location determining? If I do, what equipment do I need for it? I mean, it would be one unit for the whole university, or one per each floor, or what?
2)
Q: Why doesn't the Redpin iPhone client conform to the iPhone SDK
Agreement? A: Apple does not provide a public API to retrieve WiFi
data. In order to get the iPhone client working we had to use a
private API, which is disallowed by the iPhone SDK Agreement.
(c) http://redpin.org/faq.html Does it mean that RedPin is unacceptable in AppStore, so I can't use it?
3)Does Navizon I.T.S. requires some specific hardware equipment except standart routers?
Thank you all, maybe you can offer me better solutions, I hope. Thanks in advance.
Indoor positioning is a very vast field and many different solutions are available which all use a different combination of hardware/software. Some need no specific hardware to work, others need a very expensive infrastructure to be put in place. In the end, it all depends on the accuracy you are trying to achieve. Here are the most common solutions used, I ordered them by the type of technology used:
Wifi: two main techniques are used here, trilateration and fingerprinting. Both do not require specific hardware if your uni already has deployed access points (APs). Trilateration converts signal strength to distance and then intersect circles (almost exactly like GPS). In general this has poorish accuracy and you need to know the exact position of APs for it to work. Fingerprinting is a pattern matching technique where you first build a wireless map of the environment and then match the measurement against this map.
Bluetooth: same techniques as above can be used with Bluetooth nodes. Of course, there's less Bluetooth nodes than Wifi so you might need to deploy some extra nodes for it to be accurate enough. Same accuracy as Wifi (roughly 5 meters)
Dead reckoning: uses an accelerometer, gyroscope and compass to calculate the speed of heading of the user. Needs to be initialized and calibrated regularly by another absolute positioning technique. Subject to drift so accuracy degrades quickly over time. Upside is its very cheap, no extra hardware or initial survey phase are needed.
UWB: very accurate techniques based on time of flight measurements. Requires expensive hardware for both transmitter and receiver. You can achieve cm accuracy with this but it's probably not what you're after
This is still an field of research so it's not that easy to find something that just works. I suggest contacting the IT department of your university, if they run a Cisco system, I know some of them provide some sort of positioning capabilities but I don't have much details.
As for your iPhone question, any app that accesses the private API to access Wifi measurements will be rejected by the App store, so you won't be able to publish anything that relies on Wifi. You can still use it for research purpose though, you'll just have to figure out the code yourself as there's no official documentation (some unofficial doc is out there though)
Good luck!
In my app, I am trying to figure out the location of my app user using WiFi (not GPS because my main area is inside the buildings), can any one please tell me how can I get user location using hotspot of WiFi.
Any basic guide or example is good .
Thanks in advance.
egards
Use Core Location. The Core Location framework hides the actual device capability from you (more or less) and (depending on the options you set) give you a best estimate for latitude and longitude. I've used the exact same app on an iPhone and iPod touch and have gotten pretty good results with the touch. It won't be as accurate, but it's good enough for most applications.
Check out the Core Location documentation and the "LocateMe" sample code from the developer site: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#samplecode/LocateMe/Introduction/Intro.html
Unless you mean to figure out the location of your user in a specific building with known Wi-Fi spots, you'll have to resort to using a IP address geolocation database. There are services, such as that provided by MaxMind, that have a database which you subscribe to for updates. The database maps IP addresses to locations.
This will only get you approximations, so your best bet is to use GPS primarily but IP address as a backup.
Is there is a way to determine an iPhone's exact location (indoors, and to a distance of just a couple of feet) via use of radio/antenna's or some other infrastructure located around premises (i.e a hospital, shopping mall, school). Will appreciate any ideas/direction (technologies, research) as for how to overcome this limitation.
If you mean for an area you have control over (setting up a location network for a specific school/hospital) as opposed to generic location, you'd be able to triangulate your position based on wifi signal power for APs with known locations.
If you wanted it to be a generic solution, and you know there would be multiple APs in/around the buildings you wanted, you could triangulate all wifi signals while you have GPS outside the building, and then reference those locations when you lose gps accuracy. The first part is something that many wardriving applications already do.
Here's an article describing a commercial technology for this purpose in high-level detail: link
And here's a link to a SO page where people have started discussing possible methodologies: link
Use the GPS and hope that you got good coverage.
Other than this, you can deploy several wifi hotspots that can measure the signal strength for each packet and do a triangulation to calculate the iPhone position with regards to three or more of these hotspots based on the signal strength each of them measured.
A quick search for "signal triangulation" on the internet reveals a Wi-Fi Based Real-Time Location Tracking technology from Cisco. I have not used it, so I can't vouch for it; and I suspect it's rather expensive. There might be other solutions as well.
The alternative would be to buy several wifi routers or access points and flash them with your own version of the firmware. You can probably use OpenWRT or DD-WRT as a base for this.
More specifically, does CL require the user to have a data connection? Or is it possible to just use the phones service connection?
Thanks!
It actually uses several mechanisms.
GPS
Cell Tower Triangulation
Wifi Hotspot cataloging
Randomly assuming you are in Cupertino
There are tradeoffs based on speed, precision, and available hardware. A first Gen iPad will only have the 3 option available while the iPhone simulator makes use of the last mechanism.
You can observe the difference in these systems in the map application where it initially guesses based on the cell tower, then refines the guess via GPS.
Only options #3 requires a data connection.
And for the humor impaired including #4 was not totally serious although it is functionally correct. (I think they simulate the GPS reporting that location rather than just hard coding it, but I haven't checked.)
You can set the phone into airplane mode and still get a location :)
It will be forced to use GPS to get it so it might take longer to get though.