A Heading Estimation Algorithm for Wrist Device Assisted by Sequential Geomagnetic Observations

Abstract

Pedestrian positioning with wearable devices is a significant application of attitude tracking. It tracks the attitude (with heading angle being the most important part) of the device in real time and provides positioning services for users based on the information of step length provided by Pedestrian Dead-Reckon (PDR), which is a cheap and efficient positioning method at present. However, amid a train of positioning methods, the joint estimate of tracking is given by a train of methods based on the direction of gravity and the earths magnetic field direction. Considering the measurement of gravity that the gravity accelerometer is exposed to heavy noise due to the complex movement of human body during walking with uniform swing arm posture and forward speed, this paper proposed a novel estimate method based on the Kalman filter with multi-state constraints and the usage of low-cost sensors, which fulfills the estimation with the sequential observation of magnetic field. Compared with other related work, this method proposed in this paper eliminates the dependence on gravity direction, avoiding the influence of heavy noise caused by additional linear acceleration in motion state, and reduces the influence of insufficient observation when using magnetic field observation alone. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by real-world experimentation results.