Indoor positioning based on foot-mounted IMU

Abstract

Abstract The paper presents the results of the project which examines the level of accuracy that can be achieved in precision indoor positioning by using a pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) method. This project is focused on estimating the position using step detection technique based on foot-mounted IMU. The approach is sensor-fusion by using accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers after initial alignment is completed. By estimating and compensating the drift errors in each step, the proposed method can reduce errors during the footsteps. There is an advantage of the step detection combined with ZUPT and ZARU for calculating the actual position, distance travelled and estimating the IMU sensors’ inherent accumulated error by EKF. Based on the above discussion, all algorithms are derived in detail in the paper. Several tests with an Xsens IMU device have been performed in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The final results show that the dead reckoning positioning average position error did not exceed 0.88 m (0.2% to 1.73% of the total traveled distance – normally ranges from 0.3% to 10%), what is very promising for future handheld indoor navigation systems that can be used in large office buildings, malls, museums, hospitals, etc.