Robust Self-Contained Pedestrian Navigation by Fusing the IMU and Compass Measurements via UFIR Filtering

In order to overcome the poor observability of yaw measurement for foot-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU), an integrated IMU+Compass scheme for self-contained pedestrian navigation is presented. In this mode, the compass measurement is used to provide the accurate yaw to improve the accuracy of the attitude transformation matrix for the foot-mounted IMU solution. And then, when the person is in a stance phase during walk, a unbiased finite impulse response (UFIR) filter based on the self-contained pedestrian navigation scheme is investigated, which just needs the state vector size MU and the filtering horizon size NU, while ignoring the noise statistics compared with the Kalman filter (KF). Finally, a real test has been done to verify the performance of the proposed self-contained pedestrian navigation using the IMU and compass measurements via UFIR filter. The test results show that the proposed filter has robust performance compared with the KF.