title: Indoor pedestrian navigation using foot-mounted IMU and portable ultrasound range sensors.
abstract: Many solutions have been proposed for indoor pedestrian navigation. Some rely on pre-installed sensor networks, which offer good accuracy but are limited to areas that have been prepared for that purpose, thus requiring an expensive and possibly time-consuming process. Such methods are therefore inappropriate for navigation in emergency situations since the power supply may be disturbed. Other types of solutions track the user without requiring a prepared environment. However, they may have low accuracy. Offline tracking has been proposed to increase accuracy, however this prevents users from knowing their position in real time. This paper describes a real time indoor navigation system that does not require prepared building environments and provides tracking accuracy superior to previously described tracking methods. The system uses a combination of four techniques: foot-mounted IMU (Inertial Motion Unit), ultrasonic ranging, particle filtering and model-based navigation. The very purpose of the project is to combine these four well-known techniques in a novel way to provide better indoor tracking results for pedestrians.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Université de Sherbrooke, 2500 boulevard de l'Université, Sherbrooke J1K 2R1, QC, Canada. gabriel.p.girard@usherbrooke.ca
authors.forename: Gabriel
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Girard
authors.forename: Stéphane
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Côté
authors.forename: Sisi
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zlatanova
authors.forename: Yannick
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Barette
authors.forename: Johanne
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: St-Pierre
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: van Oosterom
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics; D003201:Computers; D004867:Equipment Design; D005160:Facility Design and Construction; D005528:Foot; D015233:Models, Statistical; D009038:Motion; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012449:Safety; D012656:Self-Help Devices; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D014465:Ultrasonics; D016138:Walking