Interval arithmetic to support effective indoor positioning of software agents

Issue title: Special Issue for the Twentieth Edition of the Workshop ‘From Objects to Agents’

Guest editors: Matteo Baldoni, Federico Bergenti, Stefania Monica and Giuseppe Vizzari

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Monica, Stefania | Bergenti, Federico^{; *}

Affiliations: Dipartimento di Scienze Matematiche, Fisiche e Informatiche, Università degli Studi di Parma, 43124 Parma, Italy

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: Federico Bergenti. E-mail: [email protected].

Abstract:  The provision of advanced location-based services in indoor environments is based on the possibility of estimating the positions of mobile devices with sufficient accuracy and robustness. An algorithm to allow a software agent hosted on a mobile device to estimate the position of its device in a known indoor environment is proposed under the ordinary assumption that fixed beacons are installed in the environment at known locations. Rather than making use of geometric considerations to estimate the position of the device, the proposed algorithm first transforms the localization problem into a related optimization problem, which is then solved by means of interval arithmetic to provide the agent with accurate and robust position estimates. The adopted approach solves a major problem that severely limits the accuracy of the position estimates that ordinary geometric algorithms provide when the beacons are positioned to maximize line-of-sight coverage. Experimental results confirm that the proposed algorithm provides position estimates that are independent of the positions of the beacons, and they show that the algorithm outperforms a well-known geometric algorithm.

Keywords: Localization as optimization, indoor localization, software agents

DOI: 10.3233/IA-190042

Journal: Intelligenza Artificiale, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 59-73, 2020