A High-Precision and Low-Cost IMU-Based Indoor Pedestrian Positioning Technique

• Published in: IEEE sensors journal 2020-06, Vol.20 (12), p.6716-6726
• Main Authors: Bai, Nan, Tian, Yuan, Liu, Ye, Yuan, Zhengxi, Xiao, Zhuoling, Zhou, Jun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: cost; Error compensation; Error detection; Estimation; Gyroscopes; height estimation; IMU; Indoor pedestrian positioning; Inertial platforms; Inertial sensing devices; Magnetic sensors; Magnetometers; motion speed; precision; Sensors; Tracking
• ISSN: 1530-437X; 1558-1748
• DOI: 10.1109/JSEN.2020.2976102

Indoor pedestrian positioning has been widely used in applications such as fire rescue and indoor navigation. Compared with other indoor positioning technologies such as Wi-Fi and UWB, inertial measurement unit (IMU) based indoor positioning does not require external facilities and has lower cost. However, the major issue of IMU-based indoor positioning is that the inertial sensors exhibit errors and the errors accumulates, which affects the positioning precision. Existing IMU-based indoor positioning techniques have reduced the accumulated error, but still face several issues in positioning precision and system cost. In this paper, we propose a new IMU-based indoor pedestrian positioning technique. It adopts motion speed based adaptive error compensation and step detection based up/downstairs tracking to improve the positioning precision without using additional sensors. Compared with the existing techniques, the proposed technique achieves higher positioning precision (down to 0.11% for the closed error, 0.15% for the distance error and 0.52% for the height error) with less number of sensors (only accelerator and gyroscope) to lower the cost.