bluetooth that could track mobile phone location

Question

newbie here. after my research, i couldnt find anything that could found what i wanted to search for my project(following robot for indoor location). without gps, bluetooth only, could i get the exact position of the mobile phone im pairing with?

here some of my research:

1. bluetooth_study this project use only bluetoot, but it only detect if somebody arrive in one destination, it didnt detect the exact location of the phone.

2. Ubertooth at 6:28, it say it could hunt down specific bluetooth device and track down its location. However it didnt mention if its the exact location calculated from ubertooth signal itselft or reading the gps location from the phone. as we know, gps is not working indoor.

thus my question here is.

1. it is possible to track down mobile phone exact location using bluetooth alone?

2. if possible what kind of bluetooth is needed?

3. if not. any other solution?

Answer 1

Yes it might be possible to obtain the location of the robot, if you use multiple Bluetooth nodes(preferably 4 excluding the one in the robots for a free space) and use the rssi values from the Bluetooth nodes to triangulate the position. But still the output is susceptible to high covariance due to some environmental factors, so for a more accurate solution you may try random forest classifiers to find a solution with lesser covariance

Answer 2

For localization problems, you will always need to have some references to look at (using only the IMUs of the phone will lead in error as time increases).

For example, GPS uses the relative position of the satellites, LIDAR SLAM uses the relative position of features, Wi-Fi positioning systems use the relative position of the access points.

In your case, you would need to have some kind of Bluetooth references, receivers/emitters to check the strength of the signal and estimate the position of your device. I have never seen any of this, but it seems interesting to have more alternatives to localisation techniques.