Comparison of Pedestrian Tracking Methods Based on Foot- and Waist-Mounted Inertial Sensors and Handheld Smartphones

Dead-reckoning is an important method for pedestrian navigation. To aid successful navigation, it primarily uses the inertial measurement signal, which is collected by an inertial measurement unit (IMU) strapped to a segment of the user’s body or an off-the-shelf sensor in a consumer smartphone. The purpose of this paper is to determine and compare the effectiveness and accuracy of pedestrian navigation systems (PNS) using foot-mounted and waist-mounted IMUs and handheld smartphones. The experimenter wore the IMU strapped to the foot and waist and held the smartphone in front of the body in the open space with ultra-wideband (UWB) positioning equipment to walk at a normal pace. The data collected by the IMU is processed by various existing typical filtering algorithms, and the estimated position is compared with the UWB positioning result, which is regarded as the benchmark performance. Through the experimental results, the positioning accuracy of the three systems under different filtering methods is analyzed in detail, thus providing a reference value for practical applications.