How a building finds things for you.
Indoor positioning looks like magic on the screen and is quite ordinary underneath. It comes down to four parts and one calculation.
- Tags on what you track
- Anchors on the building
- A gateway to the platform
- A floor plan to show it on
The four parts.
Tags
Small battery devices that go on a person, a pallet or a tool. A tag does one thing: it sends a short radio message, again and again.
Anchors
Devices fixed to the building at places the software knows. Their job is to hear the tags.
A gateway
The one device that connects the radio network to the internet, and so to the platform.
A floor plan
A drawing of each floor, with the anchors marked on it. Without it a position is only a pair of numbers.
The calculation.
A radio signal weakens as it travels. An anchor near a tag hears it loudly; an anchor across the floor hears it faintly. Compare what several anchors hear and you can estimate where the tag must be.
That estimate is the basis of mesh positioning, and it is a good one in open space. A real floor is not open space. Racking, machinery, walls and people all bend and absorb radio, so the same signal strength can mean different distances in different corners of the building.
The remedy is a survey. Someone walks the floor with a tag and records what the anchors hear at known points. Those readings form a radio map of the floor, and from then on a tag's position is found by matching what the anchors hear against the map. On Trackerserver the survey is done with the Mesh Calibration app, by one person with one beacon.
Why it is called a mesh.
The anchors do not each need a cable back to a central box. They pass messages to one another until the messages reach the gateway. The network that results is a mesh, and the kind used by InSight Mesh is Wirepas Mesh.
For a building, that has a practical meaning: anchors can run on batteries, go up without an electrician, and be added to later.
From a position to something useful.
Zones
Areas drawn on the plan and given names. A position then reads as dispatch, cold room or bay four.
Rules
What to tell someone: a tag entered a zone, left one, stayed too long, or is somewhere restricted.
History
Where a tag went, replayed over the plan.
Read on
Ready to offer indoor tracking?
Describe the building and what has to be found in it. We reply with the technology that fits, the hardware it takes and the platform that shows it.