We need to develop a solution providing our customers with indoor navigation using the Estimote technology. We have purchased the UWB beacons to simplify the mapping process, however, we have encountered an issue with the Indoor app which is when we need to map a room that is not rectangular or requires more than 4 beacons. The Indoor app enforces this constraint which we have not managed to overcome in accordance to our requirements (mapping a non rectangular room which contains more than 4 beacons).
We concluded that the only way to meet our requirements is to set-up the floor plan manually, which however renders the auto-mapping feature useless.
Does anybody know if our assumption correct or is there a way to auto-map non-ideal rooms as well?
The auto-mapping in the Indoor Location app is indeed pretty simple—we think about it more as a demo, designed to be utilized with just a single dev kit (= 4 beacons).
For actual deployments, you can email us to contact@estimote.com, and we can help you get your floor plans mapped. (This is generally a paid-support deal.)
In the future, we’d want to:
expand the Indoor Location demo to support up to a few dev kits, so that it’s possible to quickly try it out in slightly bigger and non-rectangular spaces
launch self-service automapping tools for large, production deployments
The usual “plans always change” disclaimer applies (:
Hey @heypiotr, when using the UWB beacons to auto-map a building, could you not just “leapfrog” the UWB beacons around the space?
So for each beacon, plant each pair of beacons at the extreme ends of a wall, indicating to the software which beacons correspond to which wall ends. Then re-plant two of the beacons on a new wall, and tell the software about it. And repeat with each pair of beacons, ensuring that each step no beacon has been replanted more than once more than any other beacon.
This way you should be able to map out all of the walls of a space pretty precisely.
Interesting idea—so if I understand correctly, just use the UWB beacons as a Bluetooth-enabled distance measurer? So that you need only two UWB beacons to semi-auto-map the space?
I guess my counter point would be, if the reason you’re mapping the space out in the first place is because you want to do beacons-based indoor positioning, then you need the beacons on the walls anyway. And part of the automapping process is, you not only get the floor plan, but also the position of the beacons, which is necessary for the indoor positioning math.
So personally, I’m not entirely convinced (; I think a Bluetooth-enabled, laser distance measurer + some mapping software to go with it would be a better, more generic product, that could maybe map floor plans for all kinds of purposes. (Is that a Kickstarter idea? )
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