A famous competition in the field of indoor localization and tracking, the EvAAL (Evaluating AAL Systems Through Competitive Benchmarking), was recently held in Sapporo, Japan. It was also a part of IPIN 2017 (International Conference on Indoor Positioning & Indoor Navigation). Associate Professor Liu Yu and his team from the School of Microelectronics at Tianjin University won second prize in the Tract 2 “Pedestrian dead reckoning” Competition. The EvAAL is one of the most renowned competitions in indoor positioning and navigation, aimed at encouraging research and development of indoor positioning technology.

The Competition held at Hokkaido University attracted 28 world teams from both industry and the academic community. In “Pedestrian dead reckoning” competition, there were six teams who battled it out inside the conference hall, a 2,000 km2 area with lobbies, corridors, auditoriums, staircases, ramps and so on. Besides the complex settings, the contestants also had to take into consideration interference from other pedestrians. This session was divided into two parts, with one completed by the contestants, and the other completed by randomly designated volunteers. The volunteers used the whole navigation system to judge and follow the official route, which ensured fair and reasonable competition. The sponsor set 58 precisely measured indoor and an outdoor finishing points to measure the positioning error, that is to say, the team with the minimum difference being graded the best. Professor Liu and his team applied their pedestrian positioning navigation algorithm and won second prize with a 2.13 meter error, showing the research and application capability of Tianjin University in indoor positioning and promoting the industrialization of this cutting-edge technology.

 Editors: Sun Xiaofang and Ross Colquhoun