Pedestrian Navigation System with Trinal-IMUs for Drastic Motions

The combination of biomechanics and inertial pedestrian navigation research provides a very promising approach for pedestrian positioning in environments where Global Positioning System (GPS) signal is unavailable. However, in practical applications such as fire rescue and indoor security, the inertial sensor-based pedestrian navigation system is facing various challenges, especially the step length estimation errors and heading drift in running and sprint. In this paper, a trinal-node, including two thigh-worn inertial measurement units (IMU) and one waist-worn IMU, based simultaneous localization and occupation grid mapping method is proposed. Specifically, the gait detection and segmentation are realized by the zero-crossing detection of the difference of thighs pitch angle. A piecewise function between the step length and the probability distribution of waist horizontal acceleration is established to achieve accurate step length estimation both in regular walking and drastic motions. In addition, the simultaneous localization and mapping method based on occupancy grids, which involves the historic trajectory to improve the pedestrian’s pose estimation is introduced. The experiments show that the proposed trinal-node pedestrian inertial odometer can identify and segment each gait cycle in the walking, running, and sprint. The average step length estimation error is no more than 3.58% of the total travel distance in the motion speed from 1.23 m/s to 3.92 m/s. In combination with the proposed simultaneous localization and mapping method based on the occupancy grid, the localization error is less than 5 m in a single-story building of 2643.2 m2.