Reversed Three-Dimensional Visible Light Indoor Positioning Utilizing Annular Receivers with Multi-Photodiodes

Exploiting the increasingly wide use of light emitting diodes (LEDs) lighting, in this paper we propose a reversed indoor positioning system (IPS) based on LED visible light communication (VLC) in order to improve indoor positioning accuracy. Unlike other VLC positioning systems, we employ two annular receivers with multi-photodiodes installed on the ceiling to locate the persons who carry LEDs. The basic idea is using multi-photodiodes to calculate the angle while using the received signal strength (RSS) method to calculate the distance. The experiment results show that the effective positioning range of the proposed system is 1.8 m when the distance between two receivers is 1.2 m. Moreover, a positioning error less than 0.2 m can be achieved under the condition that the radius of the PIN circle is between 0.16 m and 0.2 m, and the distance of the transmitter-receiver plane is less than 1.8 m, which will be effective in practice.