How we lost and found cars in a 9-story car park

In our office there are 9 floors of parking, each floor is 40 by 60 meters. A frequent problem is that employees forget the floor with their car and walk with keys like zombies, trying to “peep” with an alarm. It was there that we decided to run Bluetooth-based indoor navigation.

In general, the topic is hot. There is an active interest in large stores (devices for carts in the grocery store with push notifications about promotions and interesting products nearby), stadiums, airports and state-owned companies for all kinds of indoor-navigation. There was an experience for museums, but it was necessary to test a number of things. And solutions are relevant for industry (monitoring of personnel, cargo, transport; ensuring industrial safety and labor protection).
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About the sensors themselves have already written hundreds of times. I want to talk about the practice of their use in the real world. For example, one of the surprises during the tests was that they fall on people's heads.

Introductory

Initially we wanted to solve the problem using video analytics of numbers (we have an RFID pass at the entrance to the building and recognition of numbers before entering the territory), but in the autumn and spring the roads are dirty, so the video analytics disappears. We painted the doors on different floors of the parking lot in different colors - it did not help. Stylized each floor for their country and wrote the name - did not help. The result - sets of bluetooth sensors. At the same time I wanted to check out other indoor navigation applications.

The problem is solved by choosing the right sensors (the right technology and implementation) and writing the right application. With the app for navigating around the office, the idea of ​​machines is quite simple:

1. When geofense says that the employee is approaching the office, the application on iOS and Android starts the background activity. Also, an application (even iOS!) “Wakes up” if it sees beacons with a certain range of identifiers.
2. At the exit from each floor of the parking there are sensors. On the bluetooth, they catch the user's phone and "see" where he went.
3. While we believe that the user goes down the stairs or goes to the elevator, and does not go up and down in the parking lot, that is, we memorize the top floor for the interface and put the rest in the history log (also accessible, but with a lot of gestures).

This is the “where's my car, dude?” Mode. But the usual office navigation mode (screenshots from different software versions that we did during the tests, SDK Local Geo and Navigine, sensors - Kontakt.io with Rostest certificate):





In addition to the routes and the “where what” points, we quickly added integration with other information sources of the office:

Configuration

You need to place the sensors "feet" and put them on the map in admin mode:



And drive the content into the database. You can also register routes:



And build a lot more logic. But this is just a development, and there is nothing particularly difficult there. The main thing is the convenience of placing the sensors. Fortunately, on some of our models that were used for tests, there is NFC, which makes life very easy.

But let's have about the "iron".

Sensors

We had different solutions from different vendors. These are perhaps the coolest:





Inside:

• Three batteries (they serve 3-5 years - the batteries would be discharged in the same time, and their service life would come to an end). The same beacons are on the weak point (USB).
• A board with all the necessary pieces and an antenna (sends frames every 3 seconds).
• Red LED (helps when searching for the desired beacon during debugging and initialization).
• Light sensor (very cool option, turns off the beacon or puts it in the mode of rare checks in the dark, that is, at night the navigation of the office is asleep).
• Latch for mounting, attached to the body at the back of a click.
• Waterproof housing (can not dive, but can withstand a shower).

The sensor will be pretty bad at temperatures below -20 Celsius, so we put them in the parking lot near the elevators or on the staircase, where the heat is relatively close to the radiators. Here is an example of installation:



Other lighthouses were also tested, but these are the most impressive. Simple lighthouses (cheap) gave almost no surprises. Almost - this is because we fastened them to double-sided tape on the ceiling tiles, and they fell in a month or two. It is best to put them on a false ceiling.

Here is an example of installation:



Feature: if the beacon is glued to the ceiling, it can fall on the user's head. Good or stick to the false ceiling from the inside, or hang on the clip.

The result and more details

The application is still running in terms of working with users. More precisely, we add features: like the same menu of the dining room and the schedule of own events or office bot .

In the parking lot we have Beacon Pro - 32 pieces, on the second floor of the office - just Beacon - 17 pieces.

I must say that now the Internet of things devices are actively developing, in particular, now there are lamps with bluetooth beacons (interesting for shopping centers) and even lamps with a bluetooth service channel for informing about the remaining resources and failures. Refrigerator, water cooler - all this in 5G networks will be beacons. But the first swallow from Philips: here and here .

Summing up, we conclude that the use of this technology is very different - from the control of personnel at airports (who go where and where) to the characteristics of the car dealer (some of whom are “Mercedes” constantly disappeared in the territory). Another example: in the USA there is a large bus parking such as our fleet, and there the drivers are looking for their car before leaving the route for a similar application.

The applications themselves interact with each other. I now really want to bring a vibration to a fitness bracelet in case I meet a colleague in the office a second time, to know that we have already greeted each other. A joke, of course, but in general in a large company this can be a problem.

More cases

In museums, Points of Interest can be used to display data on exhibits:





In shopping centers - to search for stores:



Well, in the stores themselves - to search for goods and push the shares, if you go past the right product.

As examples from the market: Mosmetro tracks its employees (while in test operation), many shops and shopping centers in the world provide navigation services to their customers (Hamleys network, RIO shopping center, SMART trolley solutions, Shimeba solutions for shopping malls in Israel), navigation works in many airports in Europe. From the funniest: a year ago, the Finnish retail chain Kesko equipped its carts with inexpensive tablets with a store map and product information. You can type the name of the product - and the cart will “bring you” to the place. And you can also choose a recipe - and the cart will help to assemble the components. The solution itself was developed by the Finnish company Smartcart, and the navigation system was provided by the Russian Navigine. Read more at the RBC website .

Finally, from practice, I will say that lighthouses should be hung high: paranoid engineers roam around our office and sometimes remove iron from the walls for analysis. And the cleaning lady somehow asked if this thing was listening to her talk now.

References:

• Our application for museums .
• Wi-Fi navigation and visitor counters in stores .
• Mail for questions - indoorN@croc.ru.