Real-time Personnel Tracking System of Operator Processes using Bluetooth Low Energy & Camera in Warehouse Environment

Abstract

Location services using wireless connectivity devices on the Internet of Things (IoT) applications are used for proximity solutions and positioning systems. Such wireless device is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). The BLE is a wireless device provides significant reduced power consumption and cost while maintaining a similar communication range for proximity and positioning system. The location of the broadcasting device can be estimated very coarsely with Receiver Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) values. The detection and tracking system of a high-definition (HD) camera in combination with the BLE complements the real-time location system (RTLS). This study developed a real-time location, detection, and tracking system for a warehouse facility. This captures the operator’s movement stationed in each section of the warehouse floor such as location, detection, and tracking of activities, manhour per processes, and productivity. In addition, this study presents an analysis of the BLE experiment using trilateration and camera detection with the localization system. Since RSSI values are sensitive to multi-path fading and obstacles, this expect that naïve methods will not be sufficient and will yield high errors in localization accuracy. In this experiment, the study presents the results of the accuracy of the RSSI log-distance path model, detection and tracking model.