Hi there,
Does anybody know the indoor position accuracy of the Asset Tracker Kit V2? As far as I know, the Asset Tracker Kit V2 is equipped with a GPS and GSM module for tracking positions outdoor and indoor. I just found information about the GPS accuracy which is given with 2.5 m. As GPS is only working outside, I was asking myself how accurate my assets are tracked indoor by GSM.
Thanks a lot in advance!
Best
Sarah
As far as I’m aware, the gsm part isn’t actually being used for tracking at all, but as part of the electron facilitating your connection to the internet.
Indoor positioning systems are most always not very accurate due to the difficulty of getting sufficient signal strength.
What are you planning to do, and how accurate do you need it to be?
Thanks a lot for your reply.
I need to send my assets to different places to get them cleaned and fixed. On their way, they are either outside (on trucks) or inside (storage, garage, repair shop). Therefore, I need a tracking device giving me outdoor and indoor positions of those assets. I need an indoor position accuracy about 10-20 m. GPS signal only is definitely not strong enough to track my assets reliably indoor. I read that cell phones can be tracked via GSM, this was why I was thinking the GSM module in the Asset Tracking Kit V2 could be used to get indoor positioning… Any ideas to solve my problem?
Many thanks!
Sarah
You can use the GSM location on 2G/3G Electrons but the cellular module on LTE Electrons doesn’t support the respective commands.
To get GSM location you can use the Google Maps Integration as documented here
https://docs.particle.io/tutorials/integrations/google-maps/
Thanks for this interesting link! Do you know how accurate this Google Maps Integration would be for indoor positioning?
That very much depends on the environment and the cell tower density in the area, so I couldn’t make any predictions, but it’s the best you can get when you don’t have GPS reception.
However, you usually should get a GPS reading before your device enters the building and soon after it does, so do you really need to know where the device is in the building?
But here you can get some info about cell triangulation/trilateration and with that you’ll see won’t get anywhere near a reliable 10-20m accuracy
Yeah, indoor location tracking is generally pretty tricky, even with low-resolution like your 10-20m. RF signals tend to bounce around in crazy ways and you get interference patterns that can make a signal stronger/weaker in ways that you might not predict (without sophisticated modeling). I did a little bit of searching, and found that there are a few commercial systems for indoor location tracking, with very high accuracy (10cm), but it looks like they are quite expensive (to my eyes, anyways). There are also projects that use BLE or WiFi to triangulate location, and something like that might fit your needs better, though they’ll still require you to add hardware to your Asset Trackers.
One interesting project I ran across was the SubPos Positioning System, which uses a WiFi-based triangulation system.
I also found several other interesting things by searching Hack-a-Day.
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I'm just guessing, but I think these "storages, garages, repair shops" are someone else's property so equipping them with hardware (e.g. BLE beakons, localisable WiFi APs, ...) to allow a third party to locate their assets within the owner's property may be out of question.
Nevertheless, good info for anybody who's got that as possible option 
Ah, I guess I assumed we were talking about locations under the OP’s control. I definitely don’t know of any solutions that would be able to give even rough indoor location without supplemental on-premise hardware support.
Thanks for your advice!
ScruffR is right. The buildings are someone else’s property so I can’t equip them with hardware… that’s my big problem!
Why I need indoor tracking: My devices need to pass different buildings to get checked, cleaned and repaired. Some of the buildings are very close to each other and some of them are quite big. For my planning and scheduling it makes a big difference whether they are in building A, B or C and in which part of the building they are. This is why I am looking for a tracking device covering indoor and outdoor positioning.