Final work - Indoor localization

Nick Van Holsbeeck & Ludovic Bonivert

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Blogpost week 27

With today being the 10th of May, we roughly have one month left to finish up everything  related to our final work. Not only our prototype application will have to be finished but also our promotional assets such as a poster and a showreel video.

This week we brainstormed and made decisions for our poster which will have to be finished by the 16th of May. This because our school requested so. We want our poster to be designed well and most of all reflect the general flow and idea of the application. Therefor we created a fictive 3D floorplan of an airport with all related indoor constructions such as coffeebars, gates, toilets, … just as the data that is received from the back-end into our application.

Beside the floorplan, which will be the eyecatcher to show off our idea, we will also present what exactly we did, how we did it, our research about indoor localization, … The poster is not only meant to show of application design but has to give a complete overview of our final work.  This week’s work will principally be all about finishing up the design for our poster.

For the remaining weeks to come we will have to discover how we can combine all of our already written Swift code. The most important cases here are to get the 2D pathfinding map (Yes in our application this is a 2D-map because we first want to be able to get the prototype working before we implement additional features) to work based on the data received from the server together with the current user location tracked by the beacons.

Additional things, next to the poster and pathfinding, to do which are not to be forgotten:

Finding a proper name for the application (urgent for use in poster)

Pouring our research text into a proper designed document

Design a splashscreen

Design tile-image(s)

Updating “time-to-destination”-labels by calculating time between current-loc. vs destination-loc.

Making a showreel video

Final presentation

Finetuning, reviewing everything

3D/Isometric Pathfinding map instead of 2D (Additional feature)

In good spirits we are still working on this project and are certain that we can achieve what we want to show to the jury when our final presentation takes place.

See you again soon!

Nick & Ludovic

[beaconseverywhere]

Week 26 - Pathfinding and Back-end

The user interface of our application is coming close to our wishes and we decided to move on to the next part of development; the pathfinding and back-end part of our application. We made the choice to implement pathfinding with GameplayKit, a library offered by Apple. Promoted for games, there is actually no obstacle for using it as a visualisation tool for our indoor localization application.

GameplayKit is a collection of following functionalities:

Randomization

Entities and components

State machines

The minmax strategist

Pathfinding

Agents, Goals and Behaviours

Rule systems

GameplayKit offers reusability and facilitates the separation of aspects of your game like UI, AI, physics and sounds.

Promoted heavily in the several Apple tutorials of GameplayKit, we discovered a new design pattern called entities and components.  The entity-component design pattern is an architecture that favors composition over inheritance. Developing applications is rarely done in a waterfall model anymore.  Updates are done all the time, based on developer and user feedback. It’s not possible to structure an application correctly from the start. Even when you did, your best seller Alien Massacre XD would surely deserve an add-on, why would you rewrite the engine from scratch?

For developing applications that will evolve over time, inheritance based architecture hinders easy changes of the application architecture. That’s why we decided to code our application, at least for the visualisation part, in an entity-component architecture.

An entity is a general type for objects relevant to your game. Those entities gets their functionality by components. A component is an object that handles a specific and limited aspect such as sprite rendering, shooting, movement,...

Short said, it is a way to organize your code based on what each game object does instead of what each game object is.

If you are interested in the subject, I found this article very explanatory http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/component.html

The other topic of this week is pathfinding. What can be so difficult to move someone from A to B? In an ideal world you would do everything as the crow flies. But sadly, indoor localization is more complex than that.

Based on some serious research we found out that we had the following options;

Break our heads and try to build an algorithm on our own (Haha)

Implement and use an existing pathfinding algorithm like A* (pronounced  A star) or Dijkstra (hihi)

Use GameplayKit  (hoho ... hum what?)

You already know the answer; We choose to use GameplayKit. Underneath the surface, GameplayKit is using A*. Roughly all you have to do is to implement a grid and run a function like findTheBestPathFromThisPointToThatPoint() to use the pathfinding algorithm. That’s awesome!

We don’t want to overcomplicate things so we made the decision to use a two-dimensional world. What does that mean? It’s meaning that we are mapping our environment on a x-y representation like a chess board. Each x-y spot is a navigable point. An empty x-y spot is a point where you cannot navigate too. Could be an obstacle or a wall for example.

Starting from here, you have two things to implement to visualise pathfinding.

A visual representation of a 2d grid

A programmatic representation of a 2d grid

Lucky us, Apple provides libraries for both. For the visual part there is SpriteKit and for the programmatic part there is………….yes you guessed it…….. GameplayKit.

Based on Apple documentation, a programmatic representation of a 2D grid can be achieved with a GKGridGraph. It’s on that grid that you achieve the pathfinding function findPathFromNode(currentNode, destinationNode)

And that’s basically it… Here is the result.

Believe me or not, I’m really happy this is working. Of course the navigation and beacons are still to be implemented in this system but we are getting closer!

For the back-end part of our application, we are using Parse. Again, a tool that let us focus on the important problems of our application to solve. It facilitates a lot of server-side stuff like accounts and databases. We are using a back-end system to determine which places are shown in the applications. Each place would have an ID linked to his environment (An airport? A school? A Museum?) Based on the beacon signal received when opening the application, we are able to show those navigable spots like the toilets and shops.

We know beacon technology is still in their early days and article like those https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2015/02/04/the-realities-of-installing-ibeacon-to-scale/ don’t encourage us to use them for such use. But the amount of knowledge we already gained only motivates us to continue. If beacons are still not viable for large scale areas, they could enhance the experience of visitors, even in small areas.

See you next week!

Ludovic & Nick

[beaconseverywhere]

The navigation of our application has been rewritten from scratch. Before, we used an external library to simulate an horizontal scrolling menu but we realised that we could get rid of the 500 line of code and make our own, more close to our needs.

And we successfully achieved it.

The purpose of this screen is, after recognizing where the user was located, to show the spots to navigate to. Each option, here the Duty Free shops, fetches his own data and loads it into tables. For the moment it is still static data, but we are implementing a Parse database. Thanks to Parse, we will be able to retrieve the navigable locations based on the user data.

Parse is MBAAS; Mobile Backend As A Service. We will use it to authenticate our users, retrieve a database and get analytics about the app-usage. We have even the option to send push-notifications! Instead of wasting time setting up a server on your own, you have a free tier to get your app quick and easy up running.

To navigate to the locations points there are few ways possible, we are now investigating pathfinding in Gameplaykit, a library offered by Apple. Mainly used for games, there is no reason it could not work for our app. Before we link the beacon localization part with the pathfinding part, we are creating a 2D grid. That grid is the way to visualize a fictive map, showing our several points to navigate to.

Pathfinding is not an easy thing to do but with the use of the gameplaykit library, we hope to make this task easier. We estimate the time to achieve this task to 1 week. In 1 week time, we will be able to visualize a demo of the pathfinding algorithm.

Stay tuned for more updates!

[beaconseverywhere]

Development + Coffee = The absolute solution!

Here we are again with another blogpost. With the end of March at sight, we want to give a new status update of what we realized so far and things to come in the near future.

As mentioned in the previous blogpost, we are still learning Swift and its syntax. So learning the iOS 9 Fundamentals will always be on our to-do-list. We keep learning day after day, week after week. By this pace we plan to gradually be able to implement all of the necessary features for our application within the scheduled time.

We also said we wanted to implement our horizontal slider menu (with paging). This feature was recently realized and is currently working within our application. Beside those yet implemented features, now the more difficult part is up in front.

We will have to do an extensive research on how we should implement the Dijkstra algorithm within our application. This algorithm works in a way that it calculates the shortest way to reach from point A to B with several possible intermediate steps, which in our case will be iBeacons.

As everyone will see, we are completely within the development phase, and this will continue for the next upcoming weeks. Each week we try to implement different features and briefly review and test each other work.

We try to keep up the good work to be able to deliver a good looking and working prototype application. Thank you very much and ...

remember, coffee is the solution to everything.

See you next sunday!

[beaconseverywhere]

Blogpost Week 20 & 21

There is only a small part of the world that would define Swift other than a cleaning product.

Yes folks, it is also a programming language! Apple announced Swift as the new language to develop iOS applications. Sadly for us, that means going back to the learning books.

Because we made the choice to develop an iPhone application with Swift, we have to learn the new syntax and language specific stuff like optionals and unwrapping.

The learning curve is quite easy thanks to our previous programming experience. We managed to implement several things already in our application;

a loading animation

allowing the bluetooth connexion to beacons, in app or in background

Tracking the distance to the beacon

Our progression has been reviewed by our mentor a week ago. We are working on a good pace, achieving our to-dos and respecting the deadlines.

These are the next to-dos for upcoming week

Finish iOS9 Fundamentals

Implement an horizontal slider menu

Show the distance to the beacon, other than in the console

Pseudocode of the algorithm for doing pathfinding

Thank you for reading us. See you next Sunday!

[beaconseverywhere]

Blogpost Week 18 & 19

Like we explained in the previous blogpost, we made a pivot point in our final work project. We kinda trashed our original idea to the bin and started with a fresh slate. The new idea, an indoor localization application, is more close to what we want to achieve with the writed thesis; a demonstration of the potential of indoor localization.

Our new idea is taking form day by day. We had to go back to the brainstorm phase, keeping in mind that we had to exclude ideas that didn’t represent well enough the beacon technology.

Writing down the concept was the first step in the process. Drawing the concept helped us both to have the same understanding of the user flow. This two last weeks were focused on low fidelity wireframes and final mockups.

We made the choice to not show an indoor map because it requires too much design and development work. Instead, there will be a navigation system showing you the directions. Thanks to the beacon signal strenghts, we can measure user movement and guide them to the next navigation step. Such navigation system is really beacon intensive. You need a lot of them to achieve acurate indoor localization, but we are convinced that it will be part of the short term innovations.

The next step in our process is the development phase. Once there is prototype to show, we will be glad to keep you updated about it.

I hope you are even excited as we are :-D

See you next sunday!

[beaconseverywhere]

Blogpost Week 16 & 17

Two weeks ago we gave our presentation about our application idea for our Final Work. Since then we are both working for our internship company so the time we have left to work for our Final Work has to be productive. After we received some feedback from our promoter and jury, they agreed that the beacon technology in our room booking application was not really an added value. Therefor they suggested we would search another use for the beacons or look for a new application idea. After some discussion about the options we had, we both agreed to think of a new application idea where the beacon technology would be a real advantage.

So we started of with a new brainstorm session. We managed to think out some interesting new application idea’s which uses the beacon technology. We can proudly announce that our new application idea will be indoor localization inside an airport by the use of beacons. The general idea is that the user can use an application which corresponds with the beacons. Those beacons will guide the user to, for example, the gate where his plane will take off. We choose for this subject because signalisation in airports is not always obvious. Beside we can also make use of the beacons to guide the user to other places like shops or toilets and push notifications minutes before take-off.

The idea behind the indoor localization / guidance inside the building will not be by the use of a map of the building but by the use of mathematics. Creating a map would be lots of work and take lots of time, therefore our promoter suggested we should take a look at some mathematical algorithms. Those algorithms work in a specific way that they compute the time (or the distance) it would take to go from point A to F with several checkpoints in between.

Beside writing our new app idea, which was also accepted by the jury and our promoter, we also started sketching and first wireframing this week. It was important to do this so we can start developing as soon as possible.

For the upcoming week we plan to wireframe more in detail, create mock-ups en do some research to our algorithms we will need to use. All of this with considering to be able to start proper development by the end of next week. More information will follow next week.

See you next sunday!

[beaconseverywhere]

Week 15

January is the month of exams for the students of college in Belgium. We ended our exam session with a temporary evaluation of our final work. This is the opportunity to reflect on the past work and to check if we are still on schedule. Beginning october, we created four goals that needed to be achieved for this period. We are happy to share that we met all of them.

Our goals were:

A research paper about indoor localization. The paper contains history, the technology and economical aspect about indoor localization systems. It still need refinement and error checking but we are not far from done

Creating the mockups and user interface design for the prototype

The choice of application to develop, to demonstrate indoor localization

The first prototype part demonstrating the power of indoor localization

There is nevertheless still an issue with the idea that we choose to develop. A booking application for meeting rooms doesn’t demonstrate well the technology that we choice to investigate; beacons. We have several options;

keep going in this direction, saving us from losing time

keep going with this idea, but improve the use of beacons inside the application

go back to the brainstorm phase with a better idea that demonstrates the power of low bluetooth technology

We have set ourselves one week to take a decision. Afterwards, it is crucial to start the development phase of the prototype if we want to finish on time.

Keep following our updates to know more about our project. See you next sunday!

[beaconseverywhere]

Blogposts Week 11 - 14

Wow! Time really flies! But here we are again. It has been awhile  because we are both students in our final bachelor year, who were having lots of other assignments for various courses and beside january being the month of exams for us.

None the less, our final work project for the room booking app has never been far away. Amongst the other assignments, paying attention to our final work was important as our mid-term evaluation is ahead.

In the past few weeks, the most important things we worked on were enlarging our text for our paper, sketching and wireframing the desired design, expanding our programming knowledge of Swift-language by watching some tutorials and finally we started the prototype development, as this was part of one of our objects for January.

On monday 25th of January we have to bring in all of our files we currently generated as part of this final work. Afterwards, on the 28th of January we will be doing a brief presentation about our project and whether we achieved our mid-term objectives. We will be evaluated on how we did so far? Whether we achieved our objectives? Did we make enough progress through the months? Are we able to orally explain everything?

This being our last exam week and we both starting our internship in February, we will try to maintain consistency again by uploading weekly blogposts with more info about how our project is going.

See you next sunday!

[kemagezien-blog]

#Wireframes #EHB #FinalWork #AI #PaperToDigital

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Week 10

I hope you are spending a great Christmas time and new year’s eve with your family and loved ones. Our to-dos are filled with our upcoming exams and Swift learning for our final work. Both of us have no experience in the new programming language of Apple so the learning path is necessary to get us up running. We have experimented with the Estimote beacons and the results are great. In a few lines of code, we receive a notification when you enter or exit a beacon range. We wish you the best in what you create, hack and initiate in upcoming year. 

Much love, Ludovic & Nick

See you next sunday!

[beaconseverywhere]

Week 9

Week 9 off our Final Work started with a provisional evaluation-moment with our promoter. During this evaluation we examined briefly what we did so far, discussed and shared thoughts about our app idea and several cases to come passed in the future.

First off all, our promoter gave his opinion about our application for room bookings. From his point of view he was more into an application that specifically targeted the beacon technology rather than this localization technique was going to be an additional feature. However, from our research we still think that our main app idea would be great for companies and that the additionally implemented beacon technology is going to be a handy feature.

Second case to mention is that we had a talk about the development platform. With iOS having our main focus and interest, our promoter also mentioned that maybe we should divide our work during the development phase by, one person coding for iOS and the other one for Android. We did however not come to an agreement and took note of this “problem” in our discussion moments and planning.

Our development has started by searching for some sources of information about development with beacons in Swift, because iOS has is our prefered platform. After some research, AppCoda, Tutorialspoint and Youtube have shown to be great sources of information for us.

Briefly summarized, week 10 will be important in the sense of choosing our development platform, design and the first steps into the real development.

See you next sunday!

[beaconseverywhere]

Week 8

var development = “Getting started”;

This week was all about specifying the functionalities of the application and getting started with design. We initialized the development phase with milestones to be reached in the upcoming weeks. We wrote a document about the functionalities, application workflow and the different scenarios that the user could encounter.

Our application periodically triggers a scanning function to find surrounding meeting rooms. Those can be found thanks to the installed beacon for each room. The room information will be fetched by our back-end service. Such application will demonstrate the pros and cons of beacon technology.

Physically going to the meeting room to be able to book should never be obligated. That's why we will cover an extra scenario. If the user isn’t in range of a meeting room, he has the option to find one that matches the desired criteria. Therefor an internet connection is the solution to let the customer use the app and search for a desired room.

Throughout the week, we have created sketches and wireframes to develop the user flow. Wireframes helps us establish a visual structure and reinforce our development process.  

See you next sunday!

[beaconseverywhere]

Week 7

Last week we announced our choice of application for our final work; an application which allows users to book & track information about meeting rooms. It was not an easy decision to take because it needs to have a connection to the theoretical part of the thesis. We are confident in our choice and are pretty sure that it will answer most of the questions asked in the first part of our final work.

Such decision came with his hundreds of to-do’s to complete and decisions to take. We achieved the following ones this week;

For which platform are we going to develop the application?

Which programming language will we use?

Possible usage scenarios

Low fidelity mockups

We have both experience in Android & iOS development but we have a preference for the Apple development environment. XCode is a great tool and the decision to develop exclusively for iOS was immediately taken. We have experience in Objective-C but decided to develop the application in Swift instead. The new programming language from Apple is today’s way to go for writing iOS apps and making such decision will allow us to learn and experience with Swift.

Once the platform is chosen, it is easier to sketch the wireframes. But before, we had to develop the possible user flows. Our application will cover two scenarios:

Check if a room in your proximity is available & book it

Search for an available room with criteria & book it

We have started developing some low fidelity mockups for these usages. The next step is creating higher fidelity mockups (in Illustrator for example) and implement them in an iOS project.

See you next sunday!

[beaconseverywhere]

Week 6

After six weeks of research into indoor localization, we have made the decision of prototype for our final work. We didn’t choose haphazardly; we developed three idea’s in detail and compared them with three parameters:

What’s our target group?

How difficult will it be to implement the app, in relation to the given time?

Is it economically interesting ?

The three mobile app candidates where the following

Book and receive information on meeting rooms

Guide people on a tour

Push geolocalized advertisement to consumers

We decided to go for the first one. Booking meeting rooms is a tedious process. You have to spend a lot of time finding a room that’s available and has enough space for your colleagues. There are several scenarios that makes you lose precious time. Below are three examples that illustrate the difficulty and the time consuming process of booking a room.

You didn’t take time to book a room in advance. You walk through the building and find a room that seems free. You can either choose to install yourself there, with the probability to be disturbed soonish or to lookup the database to find if it’s booked. Both choices are time consuming.

You didn’t take time to book a room in advance. You walk through the building and don’t find any available room that’s appropriate for your meeting. Either there are indeed no rooms available at this moment, or more likely, some people didn’t take the time to book their room. You have to lookup the database to find an appropriate room. Again loosing time on administrative stuff.

You have realized that you have to take time to book a room in advance. You decided to use, the not-so-user-friendly booking tool from your company. You will probably need your computer first and after a few complicated minutes, you have finally booked the meeting room. You are happy that you have achievement something. When you open the meeting room, you see it’s actually not empty. An intern didn’t take the time to book a room in advance. Both you and the intern’s team did lose productivity time.

I think you get our point. “But hey guys! What’s the relation between meeting rooms and indoor localization?” I know you would ask that question dear visitor. The booking-room-app will give you the ability to find out if the room at your position is available (or not) and give you the ability to book it. We don’t want you to lose time walking miles in the office to find out where you can book one. So our app will cover an extra scenario

You have found an empty and adequate room for your meeting but you don’t know if it’s booked. 

You don’t know where you can find an empty and adequate room for your meeting.

Such application can be useful for businesses but can be also applied in other domains like educational environments.

We have experienced such hassle in our internships. We want to offer a way to facilitate booking rooms. By developing a mobile application, our goal is to book and check information of the rooms. That can be interesting for businesses but also other domains such as schools. No more annoyance about the book-a-room-for-the-meeting process.

Our thesis reviews different technologies of indoor localization. Bluetooth Low Energy has the most attractiveness for our prototype. It’s a relative cheap technology and is already used in several industries. Implementing a undiscovered method would be very tricky and time-consuming without the certitude to deliver a working application. Hereby we made the decision to use BLE and beacons for the mobile application. 

Next week’s to do’s includes the scenario’s of our meeting application together with the first wireframes.

See you next sunday!

[beaconseverywhere]

Week 5

This week was an important one in terms of planning and decision making. We had an appointment scheduled with our promoter on monday. The purpose of this meeting was to discuss the current progress and planning for the upcoming weeks. He reviewed our sources used for our thesis and confirmed these were the right sources to consult. We created an overview of the technologies used for indoor localization. It helps ourselves in making the technology choice for the future prototype. It is urgent to bite the bullet and decide which technology we will focus on. The selection of the prototype to develop will be made next week. We already have several idea’s for the prototype but we need to put the pro’s and con’s in balance towards our desires. 

See you next sunday!

[beaconseverywhere]

Week 4

This week’s “to-do” was a big and important one; the realization of the research plan for our final work. A research plan has several purposes. It helps establish:

the problem to investigate

the purpose of the research

key achievements

the research questions and subquestions

the methods of research

the success of the final work

While it can be a tedious thing to do, it gave ourselves a clear view of the upcoming weeks of work and where we would need to set extra working time. If you would like to read our research plan, you can click the link here!

Our promoters offered valuable feedback for the previous researches we executed. While it was initially the plan to focus on beacons, we expanded the subject to indoor localization.

Indoor localization has a lot more to offer and allows us many other technology usages. The localization indoors has to be accurate to be effective. Our gathered information in our research currently focused on beacons and BLE. But as we changed our scope wider to indoor localization, we discovered that there are many more technologies that can be used for indoor localization like FM radio signals.

Last but not least, upcoming monday we have a second appointment with our promoter. Together, we will discuss and analyze our progress. Such meetings helps us gather valuable tips for our work.

See you next sunday!