The Improved Constraint Methods for Foot-Mounted Pedestrian Three-Dimensional Inertial Navigation

The foot-mounted pedestrian navigation system (PNS) that uses microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) inertial measurement units (IMUs) to track the person’s position. However errors accumulate over time during inertial navigation solutions, which affects the positioning precision. In this paper, a multicondition zero velocity detector is used to detect the stance phase of gait. Then the errors are corrected in the stance phase and the swing phase, respectively, through the Kalman filter. When pedestrians are going up and down the stairs, the divergence of height will reduce the accuracy of three-dimensional positioning. In this paper, an accelerometer and a barometer are used to obtain altitude variation, and after that the stair condition detection (SCD) algorithm is proposed to correct the height of Kalman filter output and detect the walking state of pedestrians. Through theoretical research and field experiments, these algorithms are studied carefully. The results of the experiment show that the algorithm proposed in this paper can effectively eliminate errors and achieve more accurate positioning.