JSPS Kakenhi: The First Global Indoor Positioning System

The demand for ubiquitous and accurate indoor localization services is steadily increasing across various environments, including residential, commercial, and medical settings. Over the past decade, significant research efforts have focused on achieving accurate indoor localization. However, existing indoor positioning systems are highly environment-dependent, capable of tracking users only within the specific environment where the calibration data was collected and for which the system was designed. This dependency limits the universal adoption of these systems, resulting in a plethora of localization systems, each tailored to a specific environment but unable to generalize to other target environments.

This project introduces the first Global Indoor Positioning System (GIPS), designed to function seamlessly in any environment in a plug-and-play manner, without the need for recalibration. To achieve this ambitious goal, I will develop a novel indoor positioning methodology based on an innovative concept called “Environment Transformation.” Specifically, this methodology will leverage recent advancements in geometric modeling, data fusion, and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to transform any environment into a virtual representation, enabling a universal localization model to accurately track users.