Indoor Pedestrian Navigation Using Foot-Mounted IMU and Portable Ultrasound Range Sensors

Author： Girard Gabriel Côté Stéphane Zlatanova Sisi Barette Yannick St-Pierre Johanne van Oosterom Peter

Publisher： MDPI

E-ISSN： 1424-8220|11|8|7606-7624

ISSN： 1424-8220

Source： Sensors, Vol.11, Iss.8, 2011-08, pp. : 7606-7624

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Abstract

Many solutions have been proposed for indoor pedestrian navigation. Some rely on pre-installed sensor networks, which offer good accuracy but are limited to areas that have been prepared for that purpose, thus requiring an expensive and possibly time-consuming process. Such methods are therefore inappropriate for navigation in emergency situations since the power supply may be disturbed. Other types of solutions track the user without requiring a prepared environment. However, they may have low accuracy. Offline tracking has been proposed to increase accuracy, however this prevents users from knowing their position in real time. This paper describes a real time indoor navigation system that does not require prepared building environments and provides tracking accuracy superior to previously described tracking methods. The system uses a combination of four techniques: foot-mounted IMU (Inertial Motion Unit), ultrasonic ranging, particle filtering and model-based navigation. The very purpose of the project is to combine these four well-known techniques in a novel way to provide better indoor tracking results for pedestrians.