A High-Precision and Low-Cost IMU-Based Indoor Pedestrian Positioning Technique

Indoor pedestrian positioning has been widely used in applications such as fire rescue and indoor navigation. Compared with other indoor positioning technologies such as Wi-Fi and UWB, inertial measurement unit (IMU) based indoor positioning does not require external facilities and has lower cost. However, the major issue of IMU-based indoor positioning is that the inertial sensors exhibit errors and the errors accumulates, which affects the positioning precision. Existing IMU-based indoor positioning techniques have reduced the accumulated error, but still face several issues in positioning precision and system cost. In this paper, we propose a new IMU-based indoor pedestrian positioning technique. It adopts motion speed based adaptive error compensation and step detection based up/downstairs tracking to improve the positioning precision without using additional sensors. Compared with the existing techniques, the proposed technique achieves higher positioning precision (down to 0.11% for the closed error, 0.15% for the distance error and 0.52% for the height error) with less number of sensors (only accelerator and gyroscope) to lower the cost.