Beacon-based indoor location measurement method to enhanced common chord-based trilateration

To make an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs) fly in indoor environments, the indoor locations of the UAV are required. One of the approaches to calculate the locations of an UAV in indoor environments is enhanced trilateration using one Bluetooth-based beacon and three or more access points (APs). However, the locations of the UAV calculated by the common chord-based trilateration has errors due to the distance errors of the beacon measured at the multiple APs. This paper proposes a method that corrects the errors that occur in the process of applying the common chord-based trilateration to calculate the locations of an UAV. In the experiments, the results of measuring the locations using the proposed method in an indoor environment was compared and verified against the result of measuring the locations using the common chord-based trilateration. The proposed method improved the accuracy of location measurement by 81.2% compared to the common chord-based trilateration.