An Introduction to Indoor Localization Techniques. Case of Study: A Multi-Trilateration-Based Localization System with User–Environment Interaction Feature

Abstract

The problem of estimating the indoor position of a person or an object, also known as indoor localization, has gained a lot of interest in the last decades. Actually, this feature would be valuable in many application contexts, from logistics to robotic and Assistive Technology. Different solutions have been proposed in the literature, exploiting a wide range of approaches. This paper aims to provide a brief review of the state-of-the-art approaches in the field, as well as to present the RESIMA case study. The latter exploits an ultrasound-based indoor localization system and a User–Environment Interaction functionality, which allows for performing the continuous estimation of the distance between the end-user and objects in the environment. The latter is valuable to provide the end-user with efficient assistance during the environment exploitation. The main focus of this work is related to the overall description of the system architecture, the trilateration algorithm adopted for the sake of user localization and the estimation of the delay time produced by user-distance computation under different operating conditions.