Seoul National University NESL team led by Professor Chan-Gook Park won the IPIN 2017 (Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation Competition 2017) Smartphone Division


▲ The Award ceremony of IPIN 2017

 
The Seoul National University College of Engineering (Dean Kookheon Char) announced that a research team led by Professor ChanGook Park (NESL, Navigation and Electronic System Lab) of Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering won the IPIN 2017 (Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation Competition 2017) Smartphone Division. The competition was held as Sapporo Hokkaido University, Japan from September 16 to 21. 

IPIN is the only conference of the indoor location and navigation where 370 experts from 40 countries around the world participate. Since 2010, experts exchanged their researches and policies regarding the indoor location and navigation at the conference. Since 2014, the IPIN competition was hosted by the conference. In this year, a total of 28 teams from 12 countries participated the competition, which is consisted of 4 divisions.

In this competition, SNU NESL team took a new challenge to perform indoor navigation using smartphones rather than footwear-based pedestrian navigation. This year, they carried out a mission to walk 400m freely for about 10 minutes up and down the first and second floors of the Hokkaido University Academic Exchange Hall, which has a very complicated structure for the indoor navigation. The NESL team developed real-time gait navigation applications using only smartphone acceleration sensors, gyros, and barometers, and achieved the highest position accuracy among the six teams in the smartphone division of the competition. This is twice as high as the team that ranked the second.

Indoor pedestrian navigation using smartphones is a very challenging due to the restriction that GPS cannot be used. As smartphones become popular, researches for obtaining high accuracy have been actively conducted all over the world. In order to estimate users' location in buildings, various media such as indoor map, WiFi AP, and camera are typically used. SNU NESL team obtained excellent results even in harsh environments where gyro, acceleration sensor and barometer were only used and WiFi was not connected.

The technology developed by SNU NESL team does not require prior information and does not rely on the building structure and has excellent portability. Therefore, the technologies are useful for the firefighters performing rescue activities in buildings, simulated military training in virtual reality and large indoor malls. Furthermore, it is expected that it will be useful for various fields requiring people’s position.

Park Sang-jun, the director of the Korea Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute who co-hosted and operated the IPIN 2017, said, "SNU NESL team has been researching the navigation field for a long time and it showed it’s strength and potential on this field by getting the great results from the competition.” 

Meanwhile, SNU NESL team consists Ph.D. candidates Park Soo-young, Joo-jin Ho, and Jae-Hong Kim and the supervisor Professor Chan-Gook Park. The research teams has been conducting researches on GPS-INS composite navigation system, image-based target recognition, pedestrian navigation, geometry-referred navigation and lunar exploration rovers using gyros and accelerometers of various price for the 20 years. In 2015 and 2016, the team won in the IEEE Indoor Navigation Competition (IPIN) Pedestrian Navigation Division, and in April it won the second prize in the Microsoft International Indoor Positioning Contest.