The Wisdom of 1, 170 Teams: Lessons and Experiences from a Large Indoor Localization Competition

We organized an online fingerprint-based indoor localization competition in 2021. It attracted 1,170 teams worldwide. The teams were provided with a 60 GB dataset including WiFi, BLE, IMU, and geomagnetic field strength data collected from 204 buildings to build their localization algorithms, which were then evaluated against a separate test dataset. The competition received 28,009 submissions. The top team achieved an average accuracy of 1.50m. This paper reports the lessons we learned from analyzing the submissions, as well as our experiences in organizing the competition, through both qualitatively studying the teams' algorithms and quantitatively characterizing the competition results.