SpaceAnnotator: A high precision location based asset management system in indoor environment

Asset management is urgently needed in supply chain which requires to solve two basic problems 1) what assets do we have; and 2) where they are? Existing methods exploit barcode and RFID technologies to retrieve the information and quantity of assets. However, the location of asset is still hard to obtain for the lack of suitable location technologies. In this paper, a high precision location based asset management system named SpaceAnnotator is proposed. SpaceAnnotator is implemented based on TOA positioning method using Ultrasound and RF signals. Leveraging the centimeter level positioning accuracy provided by the positioning system, SpaceAnnotator maps the IDs of objects to their locations. Based on the location information, location based service (LBS) in provided for asset management. Compared with conventional location based asset management system, SpaceAnnotator works well even in managing small volume objects for its high accuracy.