Abstract
With the widespread use of indoor positioning technology, various services based on this technology are beginning to be offered to consumers and industrial applications. In the case of logistics facilities, in addition to indoor and outdoor spaces, there are top-bounded spaces (TBSs): elongated areas that are covered with roofs or eaves on the upper parts of buildings. The sides of such spaces are open, and workers and forklifts work in these areas. Only a few studies have been conducted on positioning methods for this unusual environment, and the way by which Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of Global Positioning System (GPS) changes with the stay in TBSs is unclear. Therefore, we conducted preliminary experiments and confirmed that TBS dwellings are difficult to stably detect with existing methods due to the combination of satellites with variable and unchanged SNRs. In this study, we designed a simple processing flow for selecting satellites with high probabilities of changing SNRs by using the spatial characteristics of TBSs as parameters (height, depth, and side opening orientation). We propose a method to detect the stay in TBSs using the SNR change rates of the selected satellites. As a result of evaluation experiments with three TBSs, we successfully detected the stay in TBSs with about 30% higher probability than those of an existing method.
Highlights
Indoor positioning technology has advanced significantly in the last decade due to the availability of inexpensive and easy-to-use sensors for indoor positioning, such as smartphones and iBeacon [1,2].In addition, high-accuracy positioning systems are available and beginning to be used in hospitals, factories, and logistics facilities [3,4]
To stably detect stay in a top-bounded spaces (TBSs) covered with large eaves and roofs, which is often seen in logistics facilities, we propose a method for detecting TBS stay by identifying a target satellite based on certain parameters
We designed a method to detect entry into and exit from a TBS based on the change rate of the Global Positioning System (GPS) Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of the targeted satellites
Summary
Indoor positioning technology has advanced significantly in the last decade due to the availability of inexpensive and easy-to-use sensors for indoor positioning, such as smartphones and iBeacon [1,2].In addition, high-accuracy positioning systems are available and beginning to be used in hospitals, factories, and logistics facilities [3,4]. Indoor positioning applications are available at airports and museums; in industrial applications, they are used to improve work efficiency by tracking moving objects, such as workers and forklifts in manufacturing and logistics [5,6,7,8]. The use of indoor positioning systems in the manufacturing and logistics industries is expected to increase in the future, and the market size is expected to grow [9]. Indoor positioning can be seamlessly connected to outdoor positioning using Global Positioning System (GPS) to further improve its availability. Continuous tracking of workers and forklifts indoors and outdoors in large factory and logistics facilities, and continuous tracking of trucks, containers, and shipments from outside to inside logistics facilities will be possible in the logistics industry [10]
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