Pedestrian Dead Reckoning Indoor Positioning with Step Detection Based on foot-mounted IMU

A pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) indoor positioning method with step detection based on foot-mounted Inertial Measuring Units (IMU) is proposed, tested, and analyzed in the paper. Initial alignment is completed with accelerometers and magnetometers. By estimating and compensating the drift errors in each step, the proposed method can reduce errors during the footsteps. There is an advantage of the step detection combined with Zero Velocity Update (ZUPT) and Zero Angular Rate Update (ZARU) for calculating the actual travelled distance, and estimating the IMU sensors' inherent accumulated error by Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Based on the above discussion, all algorithms are derived in details in the paper. Several tests with an Xsens IMU device have been performed in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that the dead reckoning positioning system has higher performance for a pedestrian indoors, and the position errors range from 0.5% to 2% of the total travelled distance, which are averagely better than existing PDR positioning accuracy, normally ranges from 0.3% to 10% of the total traveled distance.