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Article
Publication date: 21 September 2015

Hongyu Zhao, Zhelong Wang, Qin Gao, Mohammad Mehedi Hassan and Abdulhameed Alelaiwi

The purpose of this paper is to develop an online smoothing zero-velocity-update (ZUPT) method that helps achieve smooth estimation of human foot motion for the ZUPT-aided

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to develop an online smoothing zero-velocity-update (ZUPT) method that helps achieve smooth estimation of human foot motion for the ZUPT-aided inertial pedestrian navigation system.

Design/methodology/approach

The smoothing ZUPT is based on a Rauch–Tung–Striebel (RTS) smoother, using a six-state Kalman filter (KF) as the forward filter. The KF acts as an indirect filter, which allows the sensor measurement error and position error to be excluded from the error state vector, so as to reduce the modeling error and computational cost. A threshold-based strategy is exploited to verify the detected ZUPT periods, with the threshold parameter determined by a clustering algorithm. A quantitative index is proposed to give a smoothness estimate of the position data.

Findings

Experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the smoothness, robustness, efficiency and accuracy of pedestrian navigation.

Research limitations/implications

Because of the chosen smoothing algorithm, a delay no longer than one gait cycle is introduced. Therefore, the proposed method is suitable for applications with soft real-time constraints.

Practical implications

The paper includes implications for the smooth estimation of most types of pedal locomotion that are achieved by legged motion, by using a sole foot-mounted commercial-grade inertial sensor.

Originality/value

This paper helps realize smooth transitions between swing and stance phases, helps enable continuous correction of navigation errors during the whole gait cycle, helps achieve robust detection of gait phases and, more importantly, requires lower computational cost.

Details

Sensor Review, vol. 35 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0260-2288

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 2 November 2017

Yang Gu, Qian Song, Ming Ma, Yanghuan Li and Zhimin Zhou

Aiding information is frequently adopted to calibrate the errors from inertia-generated trajectories in pedestrian positioning. However, existing calibration methods lack interior…

Abstract

Purpose

Aiding information is frequently adopted to calibrate the errors from inertia-generated trajectories in pedestrian positioning. However, existing calibration methods lack interior connections and unanimity, making it difficult to incorporate multiple sources of aiding information. This paper aims to propose a unanimous anchor-based trajectory calibration framework, which is expandable to encompass different types of anchor information.

Design/methodology/approach

The concept of anchors is introduced to represent different types of aiding information, which are, in essence, different constraint conditions on inertia-derived raw trajectories. The foundation of the framework is a particle filter which is implemented based on various particle weight updating strategies using diverse types of anchor information. Herein, three representative anchors are chosen to elaborate and validate the proposed framework, namely, ultra-wide-band (UWB) ranging anchors, iBeacons and the building structure-based virtual anchors.

Findings

In the simulations, with the particle reweighting strategies of the proposed framework, the positioning errors can be compensated. In the experimental test in an office building in which three anchors, including one UWB anchor, one iBeacon and one building structure-based virtual anchor are deployed; the final positioning error is decreased from 1.9 to 1.2 m; and the heading error is reduced from about 21° to 7°, respectively.

Originality/value

Herein, an anchor-based unanimous trajectory calibration framework for inertial pedestrian positioning is proposed. This framework is applicable to the schemes with different configurations of the anchors and can be expanded to adopt as much anchor information as possible.

Details

Sensor Review, vol. 37 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0260-2288

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 28 November 2018

Qigao Fan, Jie Jia, Peng Pan, Hai Zhang and Yan Sun

The purpose of this paper is to relate to the real-time navigation and tracking of pedestrians in a closed environment. To restrain accumulated error of low-cost…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to relate to the real-time navigation and tracking of pedestrians in a closed environment. To restrain accumulated error of low-cost microelectromechanical system inertial navigation system and adapt to the real-time navigation of pedestrians at different speeds, the authors proposed an improved inertial navigation system (INS)/pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR)/ultra wideband (UWB) integrated positioning method for indoor foot-mounted pedestrians.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper proposes a self-adaptive integrated positioning algorithm that can recognize multi-gait and realize a high accurate pedestrian multi-gait indoor positioning. First, the corresponding gait method is used to detect different gaits of pedestrians at different velocities; second, the INS/PDR/UWB integrated system is used to get the positioning information. Thus, the INS/UWB integrated system is used when the pedestrian moves at normal speed; the PDR/UWB integrated system is used when the pedestrian moves at rapid speed. Finally, the adaptive Kalman filter correction method is adopted to modify system errors and improve the positioning performance of integrated system.

Findings

The algorithm presented in this paper improves performance of indoor pedestrian integrated positioning system from three aspects: in the view of different pedestrian gaits at different speeds, the zero velocity detection and stride frequency detection are adopted on the integrated positioning system. Further, the accuracy of inertial positioning systems can be improved; the attitude fusion filter is used to obtain the optimal quaternion and improve the accuracy of INS positioning system and PDR positioning system; because of the errors of adaptive integrated positioning system, the adaptive filter is proposed to correct errors and improve integrated positioning accuracy and stability. The adaptive filtering algorithm can effectively restrain the divergence problem caused by outliers. Compared to the KF algorithm, AKF algorithm can better improve the fault tolerance and precision of integrated positioning system.

Originality/value

The INS/PDR/UWB integrated system is built to track pedestrian position and attitude. Finally, an adaptive Kalman filter is used to improve the accuracy and stability of integrated positioning system.

Article
Publication date: 19 January 2015

Wen Liu, Yingjun Zhang, Xuefeng Yang and Shengwei Xing

The aim of this article is to present a PIN (pedestrian inertial navigation) solution that incorporates altitude error correction, which eliminates the altitude error accurately…

1021

Abstract

Purpose

The aim of this article is to present a PIN (pedestrian inertial navigation) solution that incorporates altitude error correction, which eliminates the altitude error accurately without using external sensors. The main problem of PIN is the accumulation of positioning errors due to the drift caused by the noise in the sensors. Experiment results show that the altitude errors are significant when navigating in multilayer buildings, which always lead to localization to incorrect floors.

Design/methodology/approach

The PIN proposed is implemented over an inertial navigation systems (INS) framework and a foot-mounted IMU. The altitude error correction idea is identifying the most probable floor of each horizontal walking motion. To recognize gait types, the walking motion is described with angular rate measured by IMU, and the dynamic time warping algorithm is used to cope with the different dimension samples due to the randomness of walking motion. After gait recognition, the altitude estimated with INS of each horizontal walking is checked for association with one of the existing in a database.

Findings

Experiment results show that high accuracy altitude is achieved with altitude errors below 5 centimeters for upstairs and downstairs routes in a five floors building.

Research limitations/implications

The main limitations of the study is the assumption that accuracy floor altitude information is available.

Originality/value

Our PIN system eliminates altitude errors accurately and intelligently, which benefits from the new idea of combination of gait recognition and map-matching. In addition, only one IMU is used which is different from other approach that use external sensors.

Details

Sensor Review, vol. 35 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0260-2288

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 19 June 2017

Xiaochun Tian, Jiabin Chen, Yongqiang Han, Jianyu Shang and Nan Li

This study aims to design an optimized algorithm for low-cost pedestrian navigation system (PNS) to correct the heading drift and altitude error, thus achieving high-precise…

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to design an optimized algorithm for low-cost pedestrian navigation system (PNS) to correct the heading drift and altitude error, thus achieving high-precise pedestrian location in both two-dimensional (2-D) and three-dimensional (3-D) space.

Design/methodology/approach

A novel heading correction algorithm based on smoothing filter at the terminal of zero velocity interval (ZVI) is proposed in the paper. This algorithm adopts the magnetic sensor to calculate all the heading angles in the ZVI and then applies a smoothing filter to obtain the optimal heading angle. Furthermore, heading correction is executed at the terminal moment of ZVI. Meanwhile, an altitude correction algorithm based on step height constraint is proposed to suppress the altitude channel divergence of strapdown inertial navigation system by using the step height as the measurement of the Kalman filter.

Findings

The verification experiments were carried out in 2-D and 3-D space to evaluate the performance of the proposed pedestrian navigation algorithm. The results show that the heading drift and altitude error were well corrected. Meanwhile, the path calculated by the novel algorithm has a higher match degree with the reference trajectory, and the positioning errors of the 2-D and 3-D trajectories are both less than 0.5 per cent.

Originality/value

Besides zero velocity update, another two problems, namely, heading drift and altitude error in the PNS, are solved, which ensures the high positioning precision of pedestrian in indoor and outdoor environments.

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