Indoor Navigation Using Bluetooth Beacons
Turn by turn navigation inside a building where satellite positioning does not work, using cheap Bluetooth beacons and sensor fusion. Positioning accuracy from signal strength alone is poor, and improving it with dead reckoning is the substance of the project.
Advanced
Needs a team, real planning, and a supervisor who knows the area.1 semester, 2 to 3 students
5 to ship
3 optional extrasSuggested stack
What you should ship
- Beacon deployment across a real floor of a real building with surveyed positions
- Positioning engine combining signal strength trilateration with step detection and heading
- Indoor map model with walkable paths, doors, stairs and lifts
- Turn by turn guidance with route recalculation when the user deviates
- Accuracy evaluation at marked ground truth points, reported as median and 90th percentile error
If you have time left
- Accessible routing that avoids stairs for wheelchair users
- Audio guidance designed for blind users rather than as an afterthought
- Automatic calibration reducing the manual survey effort for a new building
The problem
Satellite positioning stops working indoors, which is where people get lost: hospitals, airports, large university buildings and shopping centres. Beacons are cheap, and using them well is not straightforward.
What you build
A surveyed beacon deployment, a positioning engine, an indoor map, and navigation on top.
Why signal strength alone is not enough
Bluetooth signal strength is a poor distance estimate. It is affected by walls, human bodies, phone orientation and interference, and trilateration from it alone typically gives errors of several metres that jump around. The project becomes interesting when you fuse it with the phone's accelerometer and compass, using step detection to smooth position between beacon updates.
The result that matters
Median and tail positioning error at surveyed ground truth points, with and without sensor fusion. The improvement from fusion is your headline finding.
The unglamorous prerequisite
Surveying. You need accurate real world coordinates for every beacon and an accurate floor plan, and this takes longer than anyone plans for. Do one floor properly rather than a building badly.
Accessibility as the strongest framing
The clearest beneficiaries are blind and partially sighted users, for whom indoor wayfinding is a genuine daily obstacle. Designing the audio guidance for that case first, rather than adding it later, makes for a much stronger project.
Scope warning
One floor, one building. Multi floor transitions via lifts and stairs are a stretch goal for a reason.
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