A Foot-Mounted Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) Positioning Algorithm Based on Magnetic Constraint

• Main Authors: Yan Wang, Xin Li, Jiaheng Zou
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-03-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: FFT; magnetic field; graph optimization; foot-mounted IMU
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/18/3/741

With the development of related applications, indoor positioning techniques have been more and more widely developed. Based on Wi-Fi, Bluetooth low energy (BLE) and geomagnetism, indoor positioning techniques often rely on the physical location of fingerprint information. The focus and difficulty of establishing the fingerprint database are in obtaining a relatively accurate physical location with as little given information as possible. This paper presents a foot-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) positioning algorithm under the loop closure constraint based on magnetic information. It can provide relatively reliable position information without maps and geomagnetic information and provides a relatively accurate coordinate for the collection of a fingerprint database. In the experiment, the features extracted by the multi-level Fourier transform method proposed in this paper are validated and the validity of loop closure matching is tested with a RANSAC-based method. Moreover, the loop closure detection results show that the cumulative error of the trajectory processed by the graph optimization algorithm is significantly suppressed, presenting a good accuracy. The average error of the trajectory under loop closure constraint is controlled below 2.15 m.