LAUSR

Abstract. Visible light positioning has a good application prospect because of its simultaneous lighting, convenience, and security. However, most existing visible light communication (VLC) positioning systems cannot achieve real three-dimensional (3-D) positioning but just the small range approximation or fail to provide satisfactory positioning precision and speed. We propose a 3-D indoor localization system based on VLC using improved bacterial colony chemotaxis algorithm. The positioning problem is transformed into a global optimization problem. We reduce the dimensions of the positioning algorithm from 3-D to one-dimensional and propose a fitness function based on the simple geometric relationship between light-emitting diodes’ projection circles in the horizontal plane. In addition, we improve the traditional bacterial colony chemotaxis algorithm by adopting self-adaptive reception scope to improve global convergence and introducing differential evolution operator to overcome the algorithm premature. Our simulation results show that the mean positioning error is 0.73 mm in an indoor space of 5  m  ×  5  m  ×  6  m and the positioning time for a single point is 21.8 ms. Also, the positioning results show the advantages of the proposed positioning algorithm with high precision and high speed. The proposed positioning algorithm is practical and efficient, showing great application prospects in indoor positioning.