Indoor mapping with Estimote Beacons | Hacker News Reader

Indoor mapping with Estimote Beacons

estimote.com

41 pointscalvin_c19 comments

From my experience as someone who has already implemented an complete iBeacon based iOS App that is used as an art gallery guide I don't believe that this indoor location tracking you're advertising is working when there is more than one person in the room.

As my academic advisor always said: Every human is an 80kg water bag thats disturbing the signal.

Did you test this with multiple persons in the room and if so, what was your result concerning accuracy.

You are right that people and their bodies might absorb Bluetooth radiowaves, but our solution does combine several different techniques to minimize that effect.

This is the first version of our SDK and we encourage developers in our community to test different setup with more beacons or beacons located a bit higher, so there is always a line-of-sight between phone and beacons.

> [...] but our solution does combine several different techniques to minimize that effect.

Can you elaborate on this techniques? What is it exactly that you're using?

We have a team of data engineers in data science and PhD's measuring all the signals we receive from the beacons and performing algorithms (e.g. trilateration, least squared etc) and combining this with positioning signals we can process based on positioning of the device. The trick is to account for different devices, different antenna placement on models etc. So over time we build a database that improves accuracy based on usage. Regarding people being present, we can account for that if we predict that signals are reflecting differently based on estimated density. These are super challenging problems so we have a team dedicated to it, and iterate quickly.

Cool, thanks for answering.

Low energy bluetooth is neat technology and I'm impressed with Estimote too.

My question is what happens when the batteries die in these beacons if you have set many of them them up in a constellation like this for intra-room location? Do you have to replace all together and reconfigure or is there some easier way to replace individual beacons that have gone flat and reconfigure them to act exactly like the one they are replacing?

This Jakub from Estimote again. Few months ago we have released "Power management" for beacons you can read more here: http://blog.estimote.com/post/91749152580/estimote-rolls-out...

Thanks to these features our beacons can save energy when not used, so if you enable "smart mode" they should last more than 2-3 years.

It says it doesn't support their stickers because they are intended to be placed on moveable objects. That sounds like it is a hardware limitation, otherwise why would they be restricting their developer community? Still very excited about this.

Hi there, this is Jakub, Co-Founder of Estimote (YC S13). Our Indoor Location SDK was designed specifically for Estimote Beacons (the bigger one with bigger battery, not the stickers). Estimote Beacons with their adhesive layer were designed to be sticked to walls vertically. Thanks to their position and antenna orientation we are able to "estimate" position of the user inside the building. Indoor location is also power-consuming for beacons while they broadcast a bit more often, so we can do better math while analyzing data. Stickers were designed for movable objects with much shorter range and a bit longer advertising intervals.

Very cool SDK Jakub, congrats! Lots of possibilities.

What is the coverage area of 1 beacons? If I want to map a big hall, how far should each beacon be placed one from another?

Hey this is Steve Cheney from Estimote. We encourage you to experiment. Basically you can cover a fairly large venue (100 feet or more on a side) with just 4 beacons. It depends on some of the variables of the venue -- walls, surfaces, existence of metal and glass for instance. But the point of the SDK is to provide smoothing and consistency and have the phone itself help resolve user location while beacons also continually reduce error propagation of signals. We have a team of PhD's building this product and taking into account tons of smart data science. The ultimate goal is to have a venue covered without requiring an entire "cell network" of beacons. You can get greater accuracy by testing with multiple beacons per wall though. We would love your feedback on what works best for you as you iterate so we can also put these improvements into the SDK.

Thanks for the support!

Would a space with multiple aisles (think grocery store) be hard to map with your current algorithm? Or if I add beacons to each aisle I should be good to go?

No connection with Estimate personally, but given what I've observed about their beacons' signal strength and what they said earlier focusing on mapping the four walls of a room, I would place the beacons along the store's four edge walls, and for better coverage in isles, I'd place beacons at the far walls of each isle end. If the device can't see both beacons, one on each end's facing wall (the outer wall, that is) then I'd consider placing more in the middle, perhaps one every 3-5 isles? It's tricky, because if the signal strength is uneven, I expect the algorithm might get confused, unless the calibration or additional beacons can help. It's possible that they'll also release an update (if it doesn't already work this way) that will support beacons "in the middle of the room" but I expect the initial release was to map rooms with the fewest number of beacons possible. In a grocery store, you might even want a beacon per "section", so if you approach frozen pizzas, you can offer those deals, or whatnot. Detecting one beacon is a lot less work than trying to locate someone using every beacon within range.

The biggest sticking point for me, seeing this release, is remote management if you deploy that many beacons (how do you know if the battery died in one?) and/or powering the beacons from other sources at some point to ensure they last longer? Oh and it said iPhone, so does this mean Android is excluded, or this is simply a first release, and as iBeacons, you can't really advertise for Android these days? :)

Finally, it would be very interesting if you were also able to use WiFi and any other signal strength indicators to assist in triangulating where a user happens to be, including perhaps M7/M8 motion. I'm sure you've thought of this. Bravo for the work so far!

Any reason why the devkit is three beacons and not four? If you need a minimum of four.. it seems a bit daft not to have that as the default size and then sell single addon beacons as necessary.

This was a historical reason. When we started shipping last year we decided for 3 beacons since it was more fun with three than one prototyping beacon apps.

Since most of the typical rooms have 4+ walls we require at least four bacons to work with indoor.

Adding more beacons does improve accuracy.

Is the reason you cannot simply use a software/cell phone GPS solution to accomplish the same thing that there's poor granularity and potentially also poor indoor GPS reception indoors?

Yes. Wifi triangulation can work, but it's not precise enough unless you have quite a few routers. You end up having to use other signals that you're nearby, and track the device's own movement, I expect. In a way, what you have here is "indoor GPS", it's just tricky to get things as accurate as we expect right now. Ultimately, I expect we'll have to rely on lots of signals, including (for some use cases) cameras or Kinect-style tracking.

I wonder if a second stationary cell phone can be used to do differential GPS and cancel out some of errors?

Can this help me find my cat? He's lost somewhere in my house. And before you ask, yes, he has a smart phone strapped to him.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com