Performance enhancement of pedestrian navigation systems based on low-cost foot-mounted MEMS-IMU/ultrasonic sensor

The pedestrian navigation system (PNS) based on inertial navigation system-extended Kalman filter-zero velocity update (INS-EKF-ZUPT or IEZ) is widely used in complex environments without external infrastructure owing to its characteristics of autonomy and continuity. IEZ, however, suffers from performance degradation caused by the dynamic change of process noise statistics and heading estimation errors. The main goal of this study is to effectively improve the accuracy and robustness of pedestrian localization based on the integration of the low-cost foot-mounted microelectromechanical system inertial measurement unit (MEMS-IMU) and ultrasonic sensor. The proposed solution has two main components: (1) the fuzzy inference system (FIS) is exploited to generate the adaptive factor for extended Kalman filter (EKF) after addressing the mismatch between statistical sample covariance of innovation and the theoretical one, and the fuzzy adaptive EKF (FAEKF) based on the MEMS-IMU/ultrasonic sensor for pedestrians was proposed. Accordingly, the adaptive factor is applied to correct process noise covariance that accurately reflects previous state estimations. (2) A straight motion heading update (SMHU) algorithm is developed to detect whether a straight walk happens and to revise errors in heading if the ultrasonic sensor detects the distance between the foot and reflection point of the wall. The experimental results show that horizontal positioning error is less than 2% of the total travelled distance (TTD) in different environments, which is the same order of positioning error compared with other works using high-end MEMS-IMU. It is concluded that the proposed approach can achieve high performance for PNS in terms of accuracy and robustness.