Smartphone pedestrian navigation by foot-IMU sensor fusion

Determining one's own position by means of a smartphone is an important issue for various applications in the fields of personal navigation or location-based services. Places like large airports, shopping malls or extensive underground parking lots require personal navigation but satellite signals and GPS connection cannot be obtained. Thus, alternative or complementary systems are needed. In this paper a system concept to integrate a foot-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) with an Android smartphone is presented. We developed a prototype to demonstrate and evaluate the implementation of pedestrian strapdown navigation on a smartphone. In addition to many other approaches we also fuse height measurements from a barometric sensor in order to stabilize height estimation over time. A very low-cost single-chip IMU is used to demonstrate applicability of the outlined system concept for potential commercial applications. In an experimental study we compare the achievable accuracy with a commercially available IMU. The evaluation shows very competitive results on the order of a few percent of traveled distance. Comparing performance, cost and size of the presented IMU the outlined approach carries an enormous potential in the field of indoor pedestrian navigation.