01
Urban GNSS
3D map-aided positioning, NLOS detection, and multi-sensor coupling for dense city blocks.
Smart driving · ride-hailing · urban deliverySelected paper pages
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · AAE
Positioning that works where GNSS doesn’t.
Urban canyon · Indoor · Tunnel · Jammed environments — multi-source fusion for embodied autonomous systems.
3DMA-GNSS
FGO
Integrity
VIO / SLAM
NLOS Mitigation
LAB STATUS
OPERATIONAL
22.3019° N
114.1812° E
SAT IN VIEW
14 / 24
HDOP
0.8
Where the work runs
Algorithms deployed across consumer-grade and industrial platforms.
Android1B+
active Android users
Urban GNSS positioning research for smartphone location services
HUAWEI40M+
Huawei smartphones
Multi-year smartphone GNSS positioning collaboration
OPPOPremium
OPPO flagship models
AI-driven urban GNSS positioning collaboration
Also adopted across these industry partners & users — cars, wearables, maps, drones, and more:
Huawei Car BU
HONOR
Tencent Maps
Meituan
Google
SAIC Motor
AIROHA
MediaTek
NYU Langone
HKSI
Hotel ICON
TowngasLab leadership
Founder & PI and Senior Research Fellow.
Academic Lead · Founder & Director
Li-Ta Hsu, PhD
Associate Professor, AAE, PolyU
- 2022 ION Per Enge Early Achievement Award
- 20 mo Google Mountain View Visiting Researcher
- HK$37M+ cumulative funding as PI / PC (all sources)
- Chair ION/IAG WG on Asian Urban Canyons
Senior Research Fellow
Michael Fu, PhD
Senior Research Fellow, IPNL
- 7 yr Google Spatial AI Tech Lead
- R&D Google Maps · Android · Waymo · Wing
- Co-founder Google Smartphone Decimeter Challenge
- PhD in Computer Science Texas A&M University
Case studies
How the work runs in real deployments.
Multi-layer overpass · the GNSS reliability problem in one frame
HUAWEI · smart driving
Continuous reliable positioning across complex urban roads.
Where GNSS becomes untrustworthy — multi-layer overpasses, tunnels, urban canyons — IPNL provides integrity judgement and multi-source fusion so the trajectory stays continuous and deployable.
2018since
9+contracts
40M+smartphones
Mobile + Car BUboth lines
Urban canyon · the test environment for smartphone GNSS
OPPO · smartphone GNSS
CNN-based direct positioning on smartphones in urban environments.
Moving from traditional indirect positioning to end-side deep feature learning — improving GNSS solution stability in urban canyons. Verified across Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong commercial districts.
PremiumOPPO flagships
4 citiescommercial-district verification
End-sidedeployable
CNNdirect positioning
Stairio · GNSS-denied indoor inspection loop
STAIRIO · indoor inspection
Continuous positioning + inspection in GNSS-denied stairwells.
Hong Kong's high-rise stairwells need high-frequency inspection. Stairio is a handrail-affixed locomotion platform with onboard AI vision — closed loop of localization, inspection, recording, alerting.
Geneva 2026Gold Medal
Hotel ICONpilot site
Elite windsurfing · HKSI
HKSI · sports-tech
Smart sports monitoring for elite windsurfing.
A research collaboration between PolyU (Dept of Aeronautical & Aviation Engineering) and the Hong Kong Sports Institute (HKSI), applying innovative technologies to elite windsurfing — advancing data-informed athlete monitoring and performance support, with knowledge exchange between academia and the high-performance sports sector.
HKSIHK Sports Institute
2026–PI
Sports sci.performance support
Capabilities
Four engineering directions, each with a clear industry exit.
02
Lightweight indoor PNT
Indoor positioning under terminal compute and power constraints — smartphones, wearables, AR.
Smartphone · wearable · AR glassesSelected paper pages
03
Signal-denied navigation
Continuous positioning in tunnels, underground utility corridors, and mining sites.
Mining · utility corridor · inspectionSelected paper pages
04
Anti-jamming PNT
Robust positioning under interference, spoofing, and signal denial.
Defense · aviation · critical infrastructureSelected paper pages
Current work
Live engineering projects, 2026 cohort.
Vehicle self-diagnosis
Onboard runtime integrity monitoring for autonomous and assisted driving.
Urban Air Traffic Management
Robust GNSS for low-altitude drones in HK/Mainland airspace.
Multi-Agent Collaborative GNSS
Cooperative positioning across vehicle fleets sharing range and signal observations.
Stairio — autonomous staircase inspection
GNSS-denied indoor mobility. Geneva 2026 Gold Medal. Hotel ICON pilot site.
Recent record
Awards, residencies, patents.
- 2026 Geneva Inventions Gold Medal — Stairio.
- 2024 Google Unrestricted Research Grant · completion of 20-month residency at Google Android Context.
- 2024 US Patent 12 123 961 B2 — 3D LiDAR-Aided GNSS NLOS Detection and Correction.
- 2022 PolyU Presidential Award in Knowledge Transfer.
- 2022 ION Per Enge Early Achievement Award — sole international recipient for the year.
Book + companion code
Principles of Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation
The Artech House book turns IPNL's indoor-positioning methods into a teachable, reproducible reference; IPIN-Examples links chapters to executable Python and Jupyter notebooks.