A New Quaternion Kalman Filter Based Foot-Mounted IMU and UWB Tightly-Coupled Method for Indoor Pedestrian Navigation

Abstract

In the field of indoor pedestrian navigation (IPN), the orientation information of a pedestrian is often obtained by means of strap-down inertial navigation system (SINS). To deal with the problem of divergence in SINS based orientation estimates, additional orientation sensors, such as a camera, are needed to provide external orientation observations, resulting in increased cost and complexity of system. Although a low-cost magnetometer (or compass) can be used, it is significantly affected by geomagnetic disturbances indoors. Besides, the magnetometer can only give the heading observation which is insufficient to correct orientation errors in all three directions. In this paper, we propose a novel IPN method based on shoe-mounted micro-electro-mechanical systems inertial measurement unit and ultra-wideband. The biggest advantage of this method is able to obtain high-precision position and orientation estimates at low cost. In addition, in the proposed method, the data fusion is implemented by a quaternion Kalman filter which does not involve any complex linearization and hence the system complexity is reduced. Experimental results show that a decimeter level position accuracy is achieved and the orientation drifts can be limited to 0.066 radians in indoor environments.