A Self-Adaptive Bluetooth Indoor Localization System using LSTM-based Distance Estimator

In recent years, there is an increasing demand for indoor localization services with the aim to locate people and objects inside buildings. However, localization accuracy is susceptible to inaccurate and high variant sensor measurements due to the unpredictable fluctuations of received wireless signals and the sensitivity of hardware devices. To address this issue, in this paper, we establish a new Bluetooth indoor localization system, whose architecture can be basically decomposed into two parts: the internet-of-things (IoT) framework and the localization module. Concretely, the IoT platform uses the state-of-the-art light weight Spring Boot microservice framework consisting of multi-layer structure. In the localization module, it follows the general process of trilateration but significantly distinguished from it. A set of measures are adopted to strengthen the system’s robustness when obtained measurements cannot be fully trusted. Specifically, in the first place, rather than using conventional propagation model to predict the distance between Bluetooth transmitter and receiver, we design a bran-new LSTM-based distance estimator which can better depict the nonlinearity of attenuation characteristics of radio signal. Moreover, we also employ a series of self-adaptive mechanisms, including elastic radius intersecting, multiple weighted centroid localization and self-adaptive Kalman tracking, to make the system robust against inaccurate measurements and unpredictable sudden variation of received wireless signal. A bunch of tests are conducted in both ideal lab environment and Alibaba’s large-scale warehouse, and experimental results show our indoor localization system outperforms the state-of-the-art benchmarks by a large margin in both localization accuracy and stability.