Robust Heading Estimation in Mobile Phones

Abstract

Nowadays, mobile phones are used more and more for purposes that have nothing to do with phone calls or simple data transfers. One example is indoor inertial navigation. Within this task, a central problem is to obtain a good estimation of the user heading, robust to magnetic interference and changes in the position of the mobile device with respect to the user. In this paper we propose a method able to provide a robust user heading as a result of detecting the relative position of the mobile phone with respect to the user, together with a heuristic computation of the heading from different Euler representations. We have performed an experimental validation of our proposal comparing it with the Android default compass. The results confirm the good performance of our method.