Indoor positioning solutions take asset tracking beyond the reach of GPS signals.

Indoor positioning solutions use a range of technologies to locate people, assets, and other objects indoors, essentially acting as an “indoor GPS.” But while satellite-based positioning solutions cover the entire planet with a single (admittedly expensive) deployment, indoor positioning systems depend on hardware, typically fixed anchor points, in each covered location.

Existing indoor positioning solutions use Wi-Fi, Bluetooth , ultra-wide band (UWB), acoustic signals, and RFID to locate mobile tags, with varying accuracy, cost, power demand, and ease of deployment. With so many options and no clear front-runner, deciding which technology to invest in for a specific application has been challenging.

But there is good news. Here we look at one of the first indoor positioning technologies to tick all of the boxes:

• Sub-meter accuracy
• Ultra-low power consumption
• Cost effective
• Relatively quick and simple deployment

Bluetooth indoor positioning

Bluetooth indoor positioning is among the most promising technologies for scaling up indoor tracking in a wide range of use cases including logistics, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and in warehouses and smart buildings.

Enabled using Bluetooth direction finding, the main feature of Bluetooth 5.1, the technology uses the angle of arrival (AoA) of the Bluetooth signal trasmitted by a mobile tag at several fixed anchor points to trilaterate its indoor location in real-time with meter-level accuracy.

Benefits of Bluetooth for high precision indoor localization

• Real-time meter level position accuracy indoors
• Low cost, power efficient, easy to deploy hardware
• Cross-vendor device compatibility thanks to technological standardization
• Simplified adoption due to the prevalence of Bluetooth in existing devices

See Bluetooth indoor location tracking in action

With accuracies that compare to those achieved by advanced GPS receivers in open sky environments, Bluetooth indoor positioning systems can cover a critical blindspot shared by many real-time asset tracking solutions: the great indoors.

We conducted a proof of concept trial to test the technology in a real-world industrial warehouse.