Pedestrian Inertial Navigation with Self-Contained Aiding. Andrei M. Shkel
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СКАЧАТЬ time increases. Noise sources include fabrication imperfections of individual inertial sensors, assembly errors of the entire IMU, electronic noises, environment‐related errors (temperature, shock, vibration, etc.), and numerical errors. Thus, inertial navigation imposes challenging demands on the system, in terms of the level of errors, to achieve long‐term navigation. This partially explains why inertial navigation systems were developed around 100 years later than the development of inertial sensors. It has been shown that without an error‐suppressing algorithm, the position error accumulates without bound and approximately proportional to time cubed. For example, for navigation grade IMUs, which cost a few hundred thousand dollars per axis, the navigation error will reach about one nautical mile after an hour of navigation, or equivalently less than 0.01 m of navigation error within a minute of navigation. However, for consumer grade IMUs, which cost a few dollars, the navigation error will exceed a meter of error within a few seconds of navigation [9]. Therefore, aiding techniques are necessary to limit the navigation error propagation in inertial navigation, especially in the case of pedestrian inertial navigation, where the cost and size of the system are limited.

      Pedestrian navigation has been of great interest in recent years for path finding, personal security, health monitoring, and localizers for first responder systems. Due to the complicated environment in which a person may need to navigate, self‐contained navigation techniques are fundamental for pedestrian navigation. An example of the self‐contained navigation technique is inertial‐only navigation of pedestrians, which became recently a popular topic. Most pedestrian navigation systems rely on inertial sensors and inertial navigation techniques in their core, just as any other navigation applications. However, the pedestrian navigation poses much stricter requirements on the size and weight of inertial instruments, or IMUs, due to the limitation of human carrying capacity, and the inertial‐only pedestrian application was technologically not feasible until recently.

Photos depict a comparison of (a) an IMU developed for the Apollo missions in 1960s. (b) a current commercial MEMS-based IMU.

      Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_measurement_unit

      and (b) a current commercial MEMS‐based IMU.

      Source: https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/smart-sensors/bhi160b/

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      1.3.1 Approaches

      In order to avoid the integral step in the pedestrian inertial navigation and also relax the requirement of IMU mounting position, a Step‐and‐Heading System (SHS) is an alternative. It is composed of three main parts: step detection, step length estimation, and step heading angle estimation [13]. Unlike the first approach, this approach can only be applied in the pedestrian inertial navigation. In this approach, the step length of each stride is first estimated based on some features of motion obtained from the IMU readouts. Methods based on biomechanical models and statistical regression methods are popular for the estimation. Some commonly used features include the gait frequency, magnitude of angular rate, vertical acceleration, and variance of angular rate. Then, the heading angle is estimated by the gyroscope readout, which is typically mounted at the head. This step can also be aided by magnetometers to improve the accuracy. In this way, the total displacement can be estimated combining the traveled distance and the heading angle. However, two major challenges exist for this approach. First, the gazing direction needs to be aligned with the traveling direction, implying that the subject needs to look at the traveling direction all the time, which is not practical. Second, the step length estimation remains difficult. The average value of the estimated step length may be accurate when median value generally less than 2%, but the estimate precision is generally low, with the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) about 5% [14]. With a wide adaption of hand‐held and fitness devices, this is currently an active area of research.

      1.3.2 IMU Mounting Positions