Copernicus: A Robust AI-Centric Indoor Positioning System

Abstract

Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) are gaining market momentum, mainly due to the significant reduction of sensor cost (on smartphones or standalone) and leveraging standardization of related technology. Among various alternatives for accurate and cost-effective IPS, positioning based on the Magnetic Field has proven popular, as it does not require specialized infrastructure. Related experimental results have demonstrated good positioning accuracy. However, when transitioned to production deployments, these systems exhibit serious drawbacks to make them practical: a) accuracy fluctuates significantly across smartphone models and configurations and b) costly continuous manual fingerprinting of the area is required. In this paper we propose Copernicus, a self-learning, adaptive system that is shown to exhibit improved accuracy across different smartphone models. Copernicus leverages a minimal deployment of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Beacons to infer the trips of users, learn and eventually build tailored Magnetic Maps for every smartphone model for the specific indoor area. Our experimental results show the positive impact in the positioning, even in case of minimal learning.