KR20160091609A - Location determining method for indoor appliance - Google Patents

Abstract

A method for determining a location of an in-home electronic device comprises the following steps of: enabling an in-home user terminal to measure a location by using an embedded sensor while the user terminal moves with respect to a starting point; enabling the user terminal to store adjacent locations, which are all locations of the user terminal which has checked electronic devices capable of short-range wireless communication within a reference radius; and enabling the user terminal or a location determination sensor to determine a location of at least one electronic device located at home by using the adjacent locations.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 1. Field of the Invention [0001] The present invention relates to a method for determining a location of a household appliance,

The technique described below relates to a technique for determining the position of a home appliance in a home.

A technology for controlling various home appliances disposed in a house through a certain network is emerging. Recently, a so-called smart home system provides a service for monitoring or remotely controlling home appliances using a mobile device such as a smart phone.

It may be required to grasp the position of each home appliance for the smart home service. It is possible to consider a service for displaying the state of the home appliance while displaying the position of the home appliance disposed in the home in a display device such as a smart phone.

Various existing positioning methods can be categorized as range-based positioning, range-free positioning, and event-driven positioning. The anchor-based technique is one of the most widely used range-free techniques. Nonanchor finds areas that can communicate with anchors and derives its position through overlapping areas.

N.B. Priyantha, H. Balakrishnan, E. Demaine, and S. Teller, " Anchor-Free Distributed Localization in Sensor Networks, "MIT Technical Report no. 892, Apr. 2003. C. Taylor and A.R.J. Bachrach, "Simultaneous Localization, Calibration, and Tracking in an Ad Hoc Sensor Network," Proc. Fifth IEEE / ACM Int'l Conf. Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), Apr. 2006.

The technology described below is intended to provide a technique for allowing a smartphone to perform Wi-Fi communication with home appliances to determine the location of home appliances.

The solutions to the technical problems described below are not limited to those mentioned above, and other solutions not mentioned can be clearly understood by those skilled in the art from the following description.

A method for determining a location of a home appliance in a home includes measuring a location using a built-in sensor based on a starting point while moving a user terminal in the home, Storing neighboring locations that are all locations of the terminal and determining the location of the at least one household appliance located in the premises using the neighboring locations.

The home appliance and the user terminal each include a Wi-Fi communication module. In the storing step, the user terminal transmits a beacon signal or receives a beacon signal transmitted from the home appliance, .

The adjacent location is the location of the user terminal in the secondary plane represented by the x and y axes.

Wherein the determining step determines a maximum point where a distance between all the points existing in a quadrangle including all of the x and y positions indicated by the adjacent positions for one home appliance and a distance between the adjacent positions is the maximum, The position of the home appliance can be determined as a position having the shortest distance among the maximum points.

The determining step may determine an outline including the adjacent positions for one home appliance and determine an outer circumference determined by using any three points of the appearance line to be the position of the home appliance.

Wherein the determining step determines the first diagonal line that is the longest among the diagonal lines of the contour line and the contour line including the adjacent positions for one home appliance and determines the first diagonal line of the diagonal line with respect to the contour line at the two points where the first diagonal line and the contour line meet, The outer circumference of the outer diaphragm closest to the first diagonal line may be determined as the position of the home appliance.

Wherein the determining step determines the second longest diagonal line of the first diagonal line for determining the position of the home appliance when the number of the home appliances is plural and determines the longest second diagonal line of the first diagonal line, The position of the target home appliance to be determined by the other first diagonal line can be corrected.

The technology described below can easily know where each home appliance is placed in the home when the house structure (drawing) information is provided without additional additional equipment.

The effects of the techniques described below are not limited to those mentioned above, and other effects not mentioned can be clearly understood by those skilled in the art from the following description.

FIG. 1 shows a structure of a home in which home appliances are installed and an example in which a user terminal confirms a specific radio signal while moving.
Figure 2 shows an example of the location of a consumer electronics device determined using a min-max algorithm.
FIG. 3 shows an example of determining the outer diameter by using arbitrary three points on the outline of a certain radius.
4 is an example of determining an outline including adjacent positions.
5 shows an example of determining the position of the home appliance using the convex outline and the diagonal line.
6 shows an example of performing correction that reflects the house structure when determining the position of a plurality of home appliances using diagonal lines.

The following description is intended to illustrate and describe specific embodiments in the drawings, since various changes may be made and the embodiments may have various embodiments. However, it should be understood that the following description does not limit the specific embodiments, but includes all changes, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope of the following description.

The terms first, second, A, B, etc., may be used to describe various components, but the components are not limited by the terms, but may be used to distinguish one component from another . For example, without departing from the scope of the following description, the first component may be referred to as a second component, and similarly, the second component may also be referred to as a first component. And / or < / RTI > includes any combination of a plurality of related listed items or any of a plurality of related listed items.

As used herein, the singular " include "should be understood to include a plurality of representations unless the context clearly dictates otherwise, and the terms" comprises & , Parts or combinations thereof, and does not preclude the presence or addition of one or more other features, integers, steps, components, components, or combinations thereof.

Before describing the drawings in detail, it is to be clarified that the division of constituent parts in this specification is merely a division by main functions of each constituent part. That is, two or more constituent parts to be described below may be combined into one constituent part, or one constituent part may be divided into two or more functions according to functions that are more subdivided. In addition, each of the constituent units described below may additionally perform some or all of the functions of other constituent units in addition to the main functions of the constituent units themselves, and that some of the main functions, And may be carried out in a dedicated manner. Therefore, the existence of each component described in the present specification should be interpreted as a function, and for this reason, the configuration of components according to a method of determining the location of the home appliance, which will be described below, It should be clear that it can be different from the corresponding drawings within the limits that can be achieved.

Also, in performing a method or an operation method, each of the processes constituting the method may take place differently from the stated order unless clearly specified in the context. That is, each process may occur in the same order as described, may be performed substantially concurrently, or may be performed in the opposite order.

Hereinafter, a method for determining the location of the home appliance will be described in detail with reference to the drawings.

A method for determining a location of a home appliance in a home includes measuring a location using a built-in sensor based on a starting point while moving a user terminal in the home, Storing neighboring locations that are all locations of the terminal and determining the location of the at least one household appliance located in the premises using the neighboring locations. Each step will be described in detail below.

FIG. 1 shows a structure of a home in which home appliances are installed and an example in which a user terminal confirms a specific radio signal while moving. 1 shows an example of a plurality of home appliances 50 and a moving user terminal 10 in a flat view of a house structure. In order to confirm the location of household appliances based on the structure of the home, information (drawings, etc.) indicating the structure of the home should be provided. House structure information may be secured by the user terminal 10 or received from a separate server or the like.

The user terminal 10 must be able to grasp its position while moving. A terminal such as a smart phone has various sensors such as an acceleration sensor, a direction sensor, a gyroscope sensor, a magnetic force sensor and a GPS sensor. Using the GPS sensor, positioning can be done outdoors, but it may be difficult to transmit GPS signals indoors. Therefore, it is preferable to use a method of recording the position where the user terminal 10 moves from a predetermined reference position (reference coordinates). For example, by using an acceleration sensor or a gyroscope sensor, it is possible to grasp a relative position of the terminal on the plane. In Fig. 1, the reference point is set as a door which is a point where the user enters the house. When the user enters the house, the relative position of the mobile terminal can be determined based on the door point (x ₀ , y ₀ ).

The method of confirming the presence of the home appliance by the user terminal 10 is based on the assumption that a certain wireless communication is possible between the user terminal 10 and the home appliance. For example, the user terminal 10 and home appliances can confirm the existence of each other through Wi-Fi communication. For example, a smartphone may have a Wi-Fi communication module and receive a beacon transmitted by a Wi-Fi AP, so that the AP is in a certain area. When a module that transmits a beacon signal like a Wi-Fi AP is installed in a home appliance, it can be confirmed that there is a home appliance at a certain distance through a general smart phone. Or a module capable of transmitting a beacon signal to the user terminal 10 and the home appliance may transmit a response signal to the user terminal 10 in response to the beacon signal transmitted by the user terminal 10. [ The user terminal 10 can confirm the nearby home appliances using various information transmission methods.

Further, not only Wi-Fi communication but also near-field communication such as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), Zigbee, Bluetooth and Near Field Communication (NFC) can be used. It is sufficient that the user terminal 10 can confirm the home appliances existing in the vicinity regardless of the communication method of any type. For convenience of explanation, it will be explained based on the method using Wi-Fi. The user terminal 10 is capable of communicating with a particular home appliance when the user terminal 10 is within a communicable radius. Hereinafter, it is assumed that the communicable radii are all equal to d.

It can be confirmed that there is a home appliance capable of Wi-Fi communication while the user terminal 10 moves while accessing the TV 50A which is a home appliance. The communicable radius in Fig. 1 is shown by the dotted circle included in the user terminal 10. [ The user terminal 10 stores the position of the instant at which it is confirmed that communication is possible while approaching the TV 50A, and the position of the moving point in a state in which communication is possible. The user terminal 10, which also moves the TV (50A) surrounding at 1 to determine the three positions _{{(x 1, y 1)} , (x 2, y 2) and _{(x 3, y 3)}} , and this Respectively. When the user terminal 10 is located at a radius where the home appliance 50 can communicate, the position is referred to as an adjacent position. The adjacent location may be continuously collected when the user terminal 10 is at the communication radius of the home appliance 50 and may be collected at a certain time interval and the user terminal 10 or the home appliance 50 may receive the specific message ≪ / RTI >

In addition, the user terminal 10 to move near the washer (50B) appliances in another room was determined two positions {(x _4, y ₄₎ and (x _5, y _5)}, and stores them.

In Fig. 1, the TV 50A is not located near the wall, and the user terminal 10 can acquire a plurality of adjacent positions surrounding the TV 50A. However, in the case of the washing machine 50B positioned near the wall, it is possible to acquire only a neighboring position in a certain direction around the washing machine 50B due to the wall.

The neighboring position can be represented by a set including a plurality of coordinates. The adjacent position can be expressed as C = {C _i (x _i , y _i )} (1? _I ? N). Where n is the number of coordinates. The following coordinates are described with reference to the xy plane.

Meanwhile, as shown in FIG. 1, the user terminal 10 can transmit a neighboring position measured by the user terminal 10 to a separate positioning device 80. In this case, the positioning device 80 performs a process of determining the home appliance position in the home. The positioning device 80 may be a computer device located at home or a control device providing a smart home service as shown in FIG. Further, the positioning apparatus 80 may be a device such as a separate server at a remote place. In this case, the server may be a server managed by a provider providing a smart home service. The user terminal 10 may transmit the neighboring locations to the positioning device 80 via a wired or wireless network. If the positioning device 80 is a remote server, the user terminal 10 may transmit data for an adjacent location via the mobile communication network or the Internet network.

Hereinafter, techniques or algorithms for determining the position of the home appliance using the neighboring positions collected by the user terminal 10 or the positioning device 80 will be described.

Figure 2 shows an example of the location of a consumer electronics device determined using a min-max algorithm. The minimum-maximum algorithm is a technique for estimating the position of a home appliance by comparing the positions of the adjacent positions and the areas where the home appliances are expected to be located. Hereinafter, the position of the home appliance to be searched is referred to as a target position.

The minimum-maximum algorithm is a method for estimating the coordinates of the center of each information appliance based on the distribution of C's. Assuming that there is a home appliance in an arbitrary position in the room, a comparison is made between the coordinates and C, and a position that is most likely to be selected among them is selected.

First, a target area in which a home appliance is expected to exist is designated. For example, in the xy plane by the distribution-based _{C (min (x i),} min (y i)) of a corner of the lower left _{corner, (max (x i),} max (y i)) is the upper right corner of shooting type Can be set as a target area. The coordinates A _j of all the points in the target area are compared with the adjacent positions C _i . A function F (A _j ) is defined with respect to the coordinate A _{j as shown} in the following equation (1).

The farthest distance among the adjacent positions C _i acquired for all sample coordinates A _j existing in the target area is determined. In FIG. 2, A ₁ to A ₅ are exemplarily shown and C ₁ to C ₉ are present at adjacent positions. On the other hand, the coordinates A _i existing in the target area should use coordinates having an even interval. That is, a point constituting a target area is quantized by dividing the target area into equal sizes and assigning the center coordinates of the corresponding area.

The target position of the home appliance is determined as a coordinate (p ^* ) satisfying the following condition among P _j as shown in the following Equation (2).

This method shows the highest accuracy in the case where C _i is evenly distributed around household appliances. For example, in FIG. 1, high accuracy is obtained when an adjacent position around the TV 50A is uniformly obtained in all directions.

FIG. 3 shows an example of determining the outer diameter by using arbitrary three points on the outline of a certain radius. If there is an outline of the circle shape, the center point (outer circle) can be determined using arbitrary three points existing in the outline.

3 (a) is an example of determining the outer diameter using C ₁ , C _2, and C ₃ existing in the outline. An arbitrary three points among C _i existing in the outline can be selected to determine the outer diameter, and the determined outer diameter can be estimated as the position of the home appliance. Further, it is possible to calculate the center of excellence for all C _i existing on the outline, and to determine the average coordinates of all the calculated center points as the position of the home appliance.

For example, x-coordinate defining a location M (m _x, m _y) of the appliance when said three points respectively, _{(x 1, y 1),} (x 2, y 2) and (x _3, y ₃₎ is And the y coordinate is expressed by Equation (4) below.

In this case, the distance between the outline and the center of the outer core can be calculated by Equation (5) below.

3 (b) is an example in which a point other than the actual center is determined as the position of the home appliance when a point that is not located on the outline of the circle shape of the center of the actual home appliance is selected. The center of a circle opposite to one direction of the block consisting of C ₁ , C ₂ and C ₃ is determined as the estimated position. Therefore, it is important to determine the outline centering on the appliance.

4 is an example of determining an outline including adjacent positions. The outline can be determined through a so-called convex hull algorithm.

After the convex shell is drawn for C, the outer shell is obtained by using the coordinates included in the convex shell among C _i . Even if any arbitrary three points are selected from the coordinates included in the convex shell, the error can be greatly reduced because the concave direction is directed to the coordinates of the actual home appliance. Also, since the coordinates on the convex polygon are closest to the position of the home appliance with respect to d among C _i , the coordinates of the center of the eclipse are close to the actual coordinates of the home appliance, so that a relatively accurate position measurement is possible. The positions in the outline of a given C can be expressed as H = {H _i (x _i , y _i )} (1 ≤ _{i ≤ m} ). The set of points H can be expressed by a vector h = (h [1], h [2], ..., h [m]) composed of m indexes. At this time, the x-coordinate defining the position (x _i , y _i ) of the home appliance i is as shown in Equation 6 below, and the y-coordinate is as shown in Equation 7 below.

However, there is a bias that occurs because the area in which the user terminal can move in the room is limited. In the case where the home appliance is located at the outside of the room (near the wall), since the user terminal stays at the center of the room with respect to the home appliance for a long time, the distribution of C _i is concentrated toward the center.

Diagonal lines passing through the outline can be used to solve the deflection problem of the eccentric position. It is a method to search for the position of home appliances around the longest diagonal line in the convex shell. When the household appliances are located outside the room, the convex shells are distorted rather than circular, but the position of the appliances can be estimated based on the longest diagonal line.

을 결정한다. 그리고 C_x, C_y 및 C_i를 이용하여 결정되는 외심 중에서

에 가장 가까운 좌표를 정보가전기기의 위치로 선택한다. 도 5에서는 C₁, C₂ 및 C₃를 이용하여 결정되는 외심 C₁₂₃과 C₁, C₂ 및 C₄를 이용하여 결정되는 외심 C₁₂₄ 중에서 대각선에 가까운 C₁₂₃을 가전기기의 위치로 결정한다.
5 shows an example of determining the position of the home appliance using the convex outline and the diagonal line. Determine the outline in C, and determine the longest diagonal line through the outline

. Then, in the outer circle determined using C _x , C _y, and C _i

As the position of the information appliance. To Figure 5, C _1, C ₂ and C ₃ oesim is determined using the C ₁₂₃ and C _1, C ₂ and C ₄ oesim is determined using the C ₁₂₄ near C ₁₂₃ on a diagonal from it determines the location of the appliance .

6 shows an example of performing correction that reflects the house structure when determining the position of a plurality of home appliances using diagonal lines.

The circle A1 on the left side in FIG. 6 is a case where the user terminal acquires the adjacent position evenly within the radius S around the home appliance. For example, this is the same case as the TV 50A of Fig. The circle A2 on the right side of FIG. 6 is located at the corner of the house, and only the neighboring positions in some directions around the household appliance are acquired. For example, this is the same case as the washing machine 50B of Fig.

The left circle A1 in FIG. 6 is a case where the longest diagonal line is properly determined, and the position of the home appliance using the above-described diagonal line can be determined. However, the right circle A2 in Fig. 6 is determined as a diagonal line shorter than the longest diagonal length S of circles (e.g., the left circle A1 in Fig. 6) for the household appliances. That is, when the right circle A2 of FIG. 6 is determined as an outline, the position of the home appliance will not be accurate. A technique for correcting such an incorrect position will be described.

The correction scheme described below basically assumes that the longest diagonal line is determined for positioning of a plurality of household appliances.

Let the length of the diagonal line be L _i (1 ≤ _i ≤ t) when all appliances in the room determine the longest diagonal. Where t is the number of appliances. The length S of the longest diagonal line (second diagonal line) among the longest diagonal lines (first diagonal line) for each home appliance is expressed by the following equation (8).

The maximum value of S is 2d. When the user terminal moves sufficiently and communicates with home appliances, the outline becomes close to the circumference.

Now, the position of the home appliance having a diagonal line smaller than S is corrected using the diagonal line having the length of S This correction method assumes that the radius where the user terminal can communicate with all the home appliances is the same.

이다. 이때 이동하는 방향은 건물 중심 방향이 아닌 벽면 방향이다. 즉, 어떤 가전기기에 대한 위치를 결정하는 대각선이 다른 가전기기에 대한 최장 대각선보다 작은 경우 대각선과 수직이도 벽 방향으로 D_i만큼 이동한 위치를 가전기기의 위치로 추정할 수 있다.
6 shows a case where the center position determined by L _i in the case of the right circle A2 is shifted by D _i to a more accurate position of the home appliance.

to be. At this time, the moving direction is the direction of the wall surface, not the center of the building. That is, when the diagonal line for determining a position of a home appliance is smaller than the longest diagonal line for other home appliances, the position of the home appliance can be estimated by moving the diagonal line and the vertical diagonal line by D _i .

It should be noted that the present embodiment and the drawings attached hereto are only a part of the technical idea included in the above-described technology, and those skilled in the art will readily understand the technical ideas included in the above- It is to be understood that both variations and specific embodiments which can be deduced are included in the scope of the above-mentioned technical scope.

10: user terminal 50: home appliance
50A, 50B: Home appliances 80: Positioning device

Claims (10)

Measuring a position using a built-in sensor based on a starting point while a user terminal moves in the house;
Storing neighboring locations of all the locations of the user terminal, the user terminal identifying a home appliance capable of short-range wireless communication within a reference radius; And
And determining the position of the at least one household appliance located in the home using the neighboring positions by the user terminal or the positioning device. The method according to claim 1,
Wherein the measuring step determines the position of the home appliance using the at least one of the acceleration sensor, the gyroscope sensor, the magnetic force sensor, and the GPS sensor. The method according to claim 1,
The home appliance and the user terminal each include a Wi-Fi communication module. In the storing step, the user terminal transmits a beacon signal or receives a beacon signal transmitted from the home appliance, The method comprising the steps of: The method according to claim 1,
Wherein the user terminal or the positioning apparatus determines the position of the home appliance in the home using the pre-stored home appliance structure information in the determining step. The method according to claim 1,
Wherein the determining comprises: the user terminal transmitting the neighboring locations to the location determination device; And determining the position of the home appliance by using the neighboring positions received by the positioning device. The method according to claim 1,
Wherein the adjacent location is the location of the user terminal in a secondary plane represented by x and y axes,
Wherein the determining step determines a maximum point where a distance between all the points existing in a quadrangle including all of the x and y positions indicated by the adjacent positions for one home appliance and a distance between the adjacent positions is the maximum, The position of the home appliance is determined as the position of the home appliance. The method according to claim 1,
Wherein the adjacent location is the location of the user terminal in a secondary plane represented by x and y axes,
Wherein the step of determining includes determining an outline including the adjacent positions for one home appliance and determining a position of the home appliance in which the outer circumference determined by using any three points out of the outlines is determined as the position of the home appliance How to determine. The method according to claim 1,
Wherein the adjacent location is the location of the user terminal in a secondary plane represented by x and y axes,
Wherein the determining step determines an outline including the adjacent positions for one home appliance and a longest first diagonal line of the diagonal to the outline,
The position of the home appliance in which the outer periphery closest to the first diagonal line is determined as the position of the home appliance among the two points where the first diagonal line and the outline meet and the outer periphery determined as one adjacent position located on the outline, How to determine. 9. The method of claim 8,
Wherein the determining step determines the second longest diagonal line of the first diagonal line for determining the position of the home appliance when the number of the home appliances is plural and determines the longest second diagonal line of the first diagonal line, Wherein the first diagonal line determines the position of the home appliance to be determined by the other first diagonal line. 10. The method of claim 9,
Wherein the correction is performed by moving the position of the target household appliance toward the wall surface in consideration of the structure of the house.

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