Free-walking: Pedestrian inertial navigation based on dual foot-mounted IMU

Abstract

The inertial navigation system (INS), which is frequently used in emergency rescue operations and other situations, has the benefits of not relying on infrastructure, high positioning frequency, and strong real-time performance. However, the intricate and unpredictable pedestrian motion patterns lead the INS localization error to significantly diverge with time. This paper aims to enhance the accuracy of zero-velocity interval (ZVI) detection and reduce the heading and altitude drift of foot-mounted INS via deep learning and equation constraint of dual feet. Aiming at the observational noise problem of low-cost inertial sensors, we utilize a denoising autoencoder to automatically eliminate the inherent noise. Aiming at the problem that inaccurate detection of the ZVI detection results in obvious displacement error, we propose a sample-level ZVI detection algorithm based on the U-Net neural network, which effectively solves the problem of mislabeling caused by sliding windows. Aiming at the problem that Zero-Velocity Update (ZUPT) cannot suppress heading and altitude error, we propose a bipedal INS method based on the equation constraint and ellipsoid constraint, which uses foot-to-foot distance as a new observation to correct heading and altitude error. We conduct extensive and well-designed experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results indicate that the position error of our proposed method did not exceed 0.83% of the total traveled distance.