Effective trilateration-based indoor localization method utilizing active control of lighting devices

In this paper, we propose a novel trilateration-based indoor localization method utilizing active control of lighting devices. The proposed method estimates the position of a target for measurement by utilizing a trilateration method based on the distances between the target and lighting devices calculated from the illuminance value obtained by active control. The active control involves turning on lighting devices newly installed in the target area one by one. Our method has three key ideas. The first is to remove the effect of light sources other than the lighting equipment used for localization by utilizing only the difference between the illuminance values obtained before and after turning on each lighting device. The second is to remove the influence of a human shadow by utilizing three lighting devices used for localization selected from four lighting devices newly installed in the target area. The third is to accurately estimate the position of a target by introducing a distance-illuminance model that can calculate the distance between an illuminance sensor and a lighting device accurately. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted evaluation experiments. It was found that the proposed method can estimate the position of a target with approximately 1 m error on average.