Low-cost MEMS-based pedestrian navigation technique for GPS-denied areas

Abstract

The progress in the micro electro mechanical system (MEMS) sensors technology in size, cost, weight, and power consumption allows for new research opportunities in the navigation field. Today, most of smartphones, tablets, and other handheld devices are fully packed with the required sensors for any navigation system such as GPS, gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, and pressure sensors. For seamless navigation, the sensors' signal quality and the sensors availability are major challenges. Heading estimation is a fundamental challenge in the GPS-denied environments; therefore, targeting accurate attitude estimation is considered significant contribution to the overall navigation error. For that end, this research targets an improved pedestrian navigation by developing sensors fusion technique to exploit the gyroscope, magnetometer, and accelerometer data for device attitude estimation in the different environments based on quaternion mechanization. Results indicate that the improvement in the traveled distance and the heading estimations is capable of reducing the overall position error to be less than 15 m in the harsh environments. © 2013 Abdelrahman Ali and Naser El-Sheimy.