Professor Chan Gook Park of SNU Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Wins the Smartphone and Foot-Mounted Navigation Section at the International Positioning and Indoor Navigation Competition

-Outstandingly portable technology that is not dependent on prior or external information
-Technology that can be widely applicable to a variety of fields that require the user’s location


▲Professor Chan Gook Park’s Team of SNU Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the ‘International Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation Competition’ Award Ceremony

 
SNU College of Engineering (Dean Kookheon Char) announced that Professor Chan Gook Park’s team of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (NESL, Navigation and Electronic System Lab) came first place for two sections - the smartphone (Track 1) and foot-mounted navigation (Track 4) - at the Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation Competition 2019 that was hosted by Italia Pisa (Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) from September 28 to October 3.
 
IPIN, an international academic conference with approximately 300 indoor navigation professional participants from 30 countries around the world, has been exchanging each country’s international navigation research policies and issues since 2010 with Europe at its center and since 2014 has hosted the Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation Competition. This year, there were a total of 5 sections at the competition and 40 teams participated.
For this competition, the SNU team participated in a section involving the real-time estimation of location using only internal sensors and computational devices built into smartphones instead of using cameras. This year, the company carried out a high-level mission of walking 600 meters freely for about 15 minutes while conducting routine activities like walking up and down 1~3 floors of Pisa ISTI-CNR using stairs and elevators, opening closed doors, or standing up and down on the spot. The SNU team developed a real-time foot-mounted navigation application that only uses a smartphone’s accelerometer, gyroscope, geomagnetic field and barometer, which set the highest locating accuracy of 3.8m out of the 11 teams that participated in this section. This record is more than twice the accuracy record of 7.4m set by the runner-up team and is a commendably close figure to the record of 3.64m set by the winning team of the section using computer and video sensors (Track 2).
 
Indoor foot-mounted navigation is a highly challenging topic due to the constraints of not being able to use GPS and as smartphones are becoming popular, research for achieving high precision with even low-price sensors is actively being conducted worldwide. For detecting the user’s location within a building, a variety of tools like the building’s indoor maps, Wi-Fi APs and cameras can be used but SNU’s team accomplished their results even in limiting situations where they did not use radio waves or images but only used inertial sensors, geomagnetic fields and barometers to generate results of high accuracy.
 
Because the technology secured by SNU Professor Chan Gook Park through this competition does not require any prior information and is not dependent on external information like building structure and is highly portable, it can be used to detect locations when applied to a variety of fields like finding one’s location in large shopping malls, simulated military training in virtual reality, firemen during rescue work etc. The SNU team, with Professor Seong-Yun Cho of Kyungil University also participated in the Track 4 sector which processes data collected through shoe-mounted sensors and won by showing an accuracy of 1.6m. This section also involved highly complicated tasks like walking on the spot, walking sideways, and freely walking in circular patterns in corridors within the 15 minutes of walking for 1.1 km.
 
Meanwhile the SNU NESL team, under the lead of Professor Chan Gook Park of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, is composed of post-doctoral students So Young Park, Jae Hong Lee and master’s student Hyun Woong Kang and for the past 20 years has been using gyrospcope and acceleration sensors of various price ranges to actively carry out research like moon exploration rovers, terrain reference navigation, GPS-INS combined navigation system, image navigation system and foot-mounted navigation. From 2015-2017 they came first place three consecutive times at the Indoor Navigation Competition and came 2^nd place at the Microsoft International Indoor Commission Competition in 2017.