A Hybrid Framework for Mitigating Heading Drift for a Wearable Pedestrian Navigation System through Adaptive Fusion of Inertial and Magnetic Measurements

Abstract

Pedestrian navigation systems could serve as a good supplement for other navigation methods or for extending navigation into areas where other navigation systems are invalid. Due to the accumulation of inertial sensing errors, foot-mounted inertial-sensor-based pedestrian navigation systems (PNSs) suffer from drift, especially heading drift. To mitigate heading drift, considering the complexity of human motion and the environment, we introduce a novel hybrid framework that integrates a foot-state classifier that triggers the zero-velocity update (ZUPT) algorithm, zero-angular-rate update (ZARU) algorithm, and a state lock, a magnetic disturbance detector, a human-motion-classifier-aided adaptive fusion module (AFM) that outputs an adaptive heading error measurement by fusing heuristic and magnetic algorithms rather than simply switching them, and an error-state Kalman filter (ESKF) that estimates the optimal systematic error. The validation datasets include a Vicon loop dataset that spans 324.3 m in a single room for approximately 300 s and challenging walking datasets that cover large indoor and outdoor environments with a total distance of 12.98 km. A total of five different frameworks with different heading drift correction methods, including the proposed framework, were validated on these datasets, which demonstrated that our proposed ZUPT–ZARU–AFM–ESKF-aided PNS outperforms other frameworks and clearly mitigates heading drift.