Pedestrian Dead Reckoning Method Based on Array IMU

Consumer-grade micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) inertial measurement unit (IMU) suffers from severe random noise, which prevents precisely pedestrian localization. To improve the accuracy of pedestrian localization based on consumer-grade MEMS IMU, we designed an array IMU comprising four consumer-grade MEMS IMUs and proposed a pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) method based on the array IMU. A weighted data fusion algorithm was introduced with a bias instability coefficient to improve the fusion accuracy, and the pedestrian localization algorithm was improved by incorporating pedestrian motion characteristics. A 1-km pedestrian localization experiment demonstrated that the proposed PDR method based on the array IMU achieved a horizontal positioning error of around 0.5%. Furthermore, the horizontal positioning error and noise coefficient of the array IMU were both reduced by 0.9 times compared to a single IMU, approaching the theoretical limit of 1 time.