Indoor Positioning System

People use positioning systems like GPS on an hourly basis without realizing it.

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What is Indoor Positioning?

An Introduction to IPS

What does an IPS (Indoor Positioning System) do? People use positioning systems such as GPS on an hourly basis without realizing it. However, GPS doesn’t work inside a building and does not provide enough accuracy to be useful in indoor venues where things are very close to each other. Indoor Location Based Services will help customers find products and services quickly and easily.

In an indoor setting, high accuracy is the key. An Indoor Positioning System must provide much greater accuracy compared to GPS, which is used over long distances or areas.

A General Rule of Thumb

In order to implement a positioning system, you must have several reference points with a known location or a known path of movement. In the case of GPS, there are satellites with a known trajectory orbiting the earth. For indoor locations, you need to have some kind of device installed in the building that provides reference points (the exception is photographic positioning, which mimics the complex processes of the human brain). There is no way you can know your position without reference points. Most IPS’s use devices that utilize radio frequency signals at a fixed location to provide your position on a map.

Alternative Methods

Photographic methods mimicking the human brain are very expensive and require knowledge of the landscape. They require a large database of images. Maintaining the system is also expensive. You basically need to photograph every single corner of your building periodically. It will never work in locations such as parking lots where the landscape changes very frequently.

Positioning someone on a particular floor is a major challenge for most IPS’s. This is mainly due to the big margin of error of radio frequency based IPS’s. However, IPS’s that use non-radio frequency methods are very expensive to implement and maintain.

Docent’s IPS

Low Cost and High Accuracy

Our basic devices cost as low as $60 per 2,000 sqm (20,000 sqft). Once installed, they can last up to 20 years without maintenance.

Our basic IPS utilizes a set of unique algorithms that will give you 1 to 3 meter (3 to 10 ft.) accuracy to make sure it positions you at the right spot and more importantly on the right floor. IPS’s with a higher margin of error of 3 meters can position you on the wrong floor.

We try our best to make our hardware as low cost as possible. It’s our intelligent software that provides greater value, not expensive hardware with super-fast processors and exotic parts that are not needed for most situations.

Flexibility

We are a platform provider run by resident and non-resident scientists and engineers. Therefore, we can provide different levels of IPS technologies depending on your needs and budget.

One of our patented IPS’s provides accuracy up to 15 centimeters (6 in.). Our basic nodes, which have 1 to 3 meter (3 to 10 ft.) accuracy depending on the complexity of the space, utilize regular smartphone protocols. However, some of our systems with very high accuracy require a special receiver.

Our IPS uses a proprietary algorithm that yields highly stable and highly accurate positions of your customers’ phones or our tags.

We also can customize the IPS to suit your accuracy needs. Contact us to find out which IPS is the most suitable for your organization.