An Indoor Positioning System Based on Bluetooth RSSI and PDR for a Smartphone

Abstract

This paper proposes an indoor positioning system for walking people using Bluetooth RSSI with an accelerometer and a barometer on a smartphone. Basically, the step detection method is utilized with direction data for indoor location analysis. To estimate the moving distance of a pedestrian, signals are acquired from an accelerometer and a magnetic sensor on a smartphone. To measure the level of a floor, altitude change is calculated by using a barometer on a smartphone. In order to reduce cumulative errors of the proposed step detection method, the position compensation method is derived based on Bluetooth RSSI. To evaluate the proposed method, we have developed an indoor positioning application on an Android smartphone and experimented on the Ming-Li building of Southwest Petroleum University. We show that our proposed approach with Bluetooth RSSI achieves higher accuracy than the approach without Bluetooth RSSI.