Comparison of step length and heading estimation methods for indoor environments

Author(s):  
Juan Bravo ◽  
Edith Pulido Herrera ◽  
Daniel Alfonso Sierra
Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (21) ◽  
pp. 4609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marzieh Jalal Abadi ◽  
Luca Luceri ◽  
Mahbub Hassan ◽  
Chun Tung Chou ◽  
Monica Nicoli

This paper presents a system based on pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) for localization of networked mobile users, which relies only on sensors embedded in the devices and device- to-device connectivity. The user trajectory is reconstructed by measuring step by step the user displacements. Though step length can be estimated rather accurately, heading evaluation is extremely problematic in indoor environments. Magnetometer is typically used, however measurements are strongly perturbed. To improve the location accuracy, this paper proposes a novel cooperative system to estimate the direction of motion based on a machine learning approach for perturbation detection and filtering, combined with a consensus algorithm for performance augmentation by cooperative data fusion at multiple devices. A first algorithm filters out perturbed magnetometer measurements based on a-priori information on the Earth’s magnetic field. A second algorithm aggregates groups of users walking in the same direction, while a third one combines the measurements of the aggregated users in a distributed way to extract a more accurate heading estimate. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach that combines machine learning with consensus algorithms for cooperative PDR. Compared to other methods in the literature, the method has the advantage of being infrastructure-free, fully distributed and robust to sensor failures thanks to the pre-filtering of perturbed measurements. Extensive indoor experiments show that the heading error is highly reduced by the proposed approach thus leading to noticeable enhancements in localization performance.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bo Zhao ◽  
Chao Zheng ◽  
Xinxin Ren ◽  
Jianrong Dai

Distance estimation methods arise in many applications, such as indoor positioning and Covid-19 contact tracing. The received signal strength indicator (RSSI) is favored in distance estimation. However, the accuracy is not satisfactory due to the signal fluctuation. Besides, the RSSI-only method has a large ranging error because it uses fixed parameters of the path loss model. Here, we propose an optimization method combining RSSI and pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) data to estimate the distance between smart devices. The PDR may provide the high accuracy of walking distance and direction, which is used to compensate for the effects of interference on the RSSI. Moreover, the parameters of the path loss model are optimized to dynamically fit to the complex electromagnetic environment. The proposed method is evaluated in outdoor and indoor <a>environments</a> and is also compared with the RSSI-only method. The results show that the mean absolute error is reduced up to 0.51 m and 1.02 m, with the improvement of 10.60% and 64.55% for outdoor and indoor environments, respectively, in comparison with the RSSI-only method. Consequently, the proposed optimization method has better accuracy of distance estimation than the RSSI-only method, and its feasibility is demonstrated through real-world evaluations.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bo Zhao ◽  
Chao Zheng ◽  
Xinxin Ren ◽  
Jianrong Dai

Distance estimation methods arise in many applications, such as indoor positioning and Covid-19 contact tracing. The received signal strength indicator (RSSI) is favored in distance estimation. However, the accuracy is not satisfactory due to the signal fluctuation. Besides, the RSSI-only method has a large ranging error because it uses fixed parameters of the path loss model. Here, we propose an optimization method combining RSSI and pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) data to estimate the distance between smart devices. The PDR may provide the high accuracy of walking distance and direction, which is used to compensate for the effects of interference on the RSSI. Moreover, the parameters of the path loss model are optimized to dynamically fit to the complex electromagnetic environment. The proposed method is evaluated in outdoor and indoor <a>environments</a> and is also compared with the RSSI-only method. The results show that the mean absolute error is reduced up to 0.51 m and 1.02 m, with the improvement of 10.60% and 64.55% for outdoor and indoor environments, respectively, in comparison with the RSSI-only method. Consequently, the proposed optimization method has better accuracy of distance estimation than the RSSI-only method, and its feasibility is demonstrated through real-world evaluations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (6) ◽  
pp. 583-599
Author(s):  
Xiaona Ma ◽  
Zhiyuan Li ◽  
Pei Ke ◽  
Shanhui Xu ◽  
Guanghe Liang ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (17) ◽  
pp. 6908-6926 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Enrique Diez ◽  
Alfonso Bahillo ◽  
Jon Otegui ◽  
Timothy Otim

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (9) ◽  
pp. 2698
Author(s):  
Jingyu Huang ◽  
Haiyong Luo ◽  
Wenhua Shao ◽  
Fang Zhao ◽  
Shuo Yan

With the widespread development of location-based services, the demand for accurate indoor positioning is getting more and more urgent. Floor positioning, as a prerequisite for indoor positioning in multi-story buildings, is particularly important. Though lots of work has been done on floor positioning, the existing studies on floor positioning in complex multi-story buildings with large hollow areas through multiple floors still cannot meet the application requirements because of low accuracy and robustness. To obtain accurate and robust floor estimation in complex multi-story buildings, we propose a novel floor positioning method, which combines the Wi-Fi based floor positioning (BWFP), the barometric pressure-based floor positioning (BPFP) with HMM and the XGBoost based user motion detection. Extensive experiments show that using our proposed method can achieve 99.2% accuracy, which outperforms other state-of-the-art floor estimation methods.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Li ◽  
Yan Wang ◽  
Kourosh Khoshelham

The fusion of ultra-wideband (UWB) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) is an effective solution to overcome the challenges of UWB in nonline-of-sight (NLOS) conditions and error accumulation of inertial positioning in indoor environments. However, existing systems are based on foot-mounted or body-worn IMUs, which limit the application of the system to specific practical scenarios. In this paper, we propose the fusion of UWB and pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) using smartphone IMU, which has the potential to provide a universal solution to indoor positioning. The PDR algorithm is based on low-pass filtering of acceleration data and time thresholding to estimate the step length. According to different movement patterns of pedestrians, such as walking and running, several step models are comparatively analyzed to determine the appropriate model and related parameters of the step length. For the PDR direction calculation, the Madgwick algorithm is adopted to improve the calculation accuracy of the heading algorithm. The proposed UWB/PDR fusion algorithm is based on the extended Kalman filter (EKF), in which the Mahalanobis distance from the observation to the prior distribution is used to suppress the influence of abnormal UWB data on the positioning results. Experimental results show that the algorithm is robust to the intermittent noise, continuous noise, signal interruption, and other abnormalities of the UWB data.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 185
Author(s):  
Fang-Shii Ning ◽  
Yu-Chun Chen

Although advancement has been observed in global navigation satellite systems and these systems are widely used, they cannot provide effective navigation and positioning services in covered areas and areas that lack strong signals, such as indoor environments. Therefore, in recent years, indoor positioning technology has become the focus of research and development. The magnetic field of the Earth is quite stable in an open environment. Due to differences in building and internal structures, this type of three-dimensional vector magnetic field is widely available indoors for indoor positioning. A smartphone magnetometer was used in this study to collect magnetic field data for constructing indoor magnetic field maps. Moreover, an acceleration sensor and a gyroscope were used to identify the position of a mobile phone and detect the number of steps travelled by users with the phone. This study designed a procedure for measuring the step length of users. All obtained information was input into a pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) algorithm for calculating the position of the device. The indoor positioning accuracy of the PDR algorithm was optimised using magnetic gradients of magnetic field maps with a modified particle filter algorithm. Experimental results reveal that the indoor positioning accuracy was between 0.6 and 0.8 m for a testing area that was 85 m long and 33 m wide. This study effectively improved the indoor positioning accuracy and efficiency by using the particle filter method in combination with the PDR algorithm with the magnetic fingerprint map.


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