▲Professor Lynn Choi from the School of Electrical Engineering

Professor Lynn Choi’s research team from the School of Electrical Engineering, College of Engineering, Korea University (Dean: Haigun Lee), has achieved a groundbreaking milestone by developing an indoor positioning system with less than 1-meter accuracy using only smartphones, without requiring prior data collection of magnetic fields or radio wave signals.  This system was implemented at the LG Chem plant in Yeosu as part of an industry-academia collaboration project with LG CNS.

This indoor positioning system allows LG Chem to establish a 'live digital twin system,' tracking all workers in real time across about 200 plants in industrial complexes such as Yeosu and Daesan. By understanding the workers' locations and movements in real time, various location-based services can be implemented, such as rapid rescue in case of safety accidents, access control and alarms for unauthorized entry into security zones, approach control to hazardous facilities, and evacuation route guidance during emergencies like fires.

The lightweight indoor positioning technology developed by Professor Choi’s team is a new approach, distinct from the magnetism-based indoor positioning technology that received the NET New Technology certification from the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy in 2020. It processes sensor data from smartphones in real-time without collecting prior magnetic or radio wave data, achieving an average positioning accuracy of less than 1 meter throughout the entire LG Chem plant building.

The LG Chem plant building features a complex, maze-like structure with unclear floor separations and irregular heights, such as 1.3 and 1.5 floors, making it difficult to use conventional radio-based indoor positioning technologies like Bluetooth beacons. Applying such technologies would require extensive electrical work for beacon installation and significant time and costs for equipment management, and accurately distinguishing floor levels using beacon signals is nearly impossible. In contrast, the team’s lightweight engine technology can accurately identify multiple irregular floors and achieve 3D indoor positioning accuracy within 1 meter.

By developing the world’s first lightweight indoor positioning technology, Professor Choi’s team anticipates enabling faster and more accurate indoor positioning systems in large-scale factories, plants, shopping malls, and other environments without prior data collection or artificial intelligence training.

Professor Choi’s team’s indoor positioning technologies encompass the newly developed lightweight indoor positioning technology, the magnetism-based indoor positioning technology certified as NET New Technology by the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy in 2020, a pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) engine based on smartphone motion sensors, an innovative RF indoor positioning engine using existing Wi-Fi AP signals, and a multilayer indoor positioning engine for precise positioning in complex multilayer environments such as stairs, escalators, and elevators. With these technologies, precise indoor positioning performance with a positioning error level of 1 to 3 meters can be provided in any environment, whether ground, underground, or indoors, using only smartphones.

Moreover, compared to traditional radio-based positioning technologies, this innovative IT technology eliminates the need for electrical work or new equipment, significantly improving both positioning performance and cost-effectiveness, earning recognition as a world-leading advanced IT foundational technology.

Professor Choi’s team’s economical and accurate indoor positioning technology is expected to provide a variety of services beyond factory worker safety, including indoor route guidance in subways and railway stations, analysis of foot traffic in shopping malls, location-based fire, safety, and disaster management, real-time tracking and analysis of infection transmission routes, infected and at-risk individuals in multi-use facilities like hospitals and stations during outbreaks of infectious diseases such as COVID-19 and MERS, and energy savings in smart buildings through efficient air conditioning and lighting based on the presence of people. /College of Engineering Newspaper