Citation

Girard G, Côté S, Zlatanova S, Barette Y, St-Pierre J, van Oosterom P. Sensors (Basel) 2011; 11(8): 7606-7624.

Affiliation

Department of Computer Science, Université de Sherbrooke, 2500 boulevard de l'Université, Sherbrooke J1K 2R1, QC, Canada.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/s110807606

PMID

22164034

PMCID

PMC3231746

Abstract

Many solutions have been proposed for indoor pedestrian navigation. Some rely on pre-installed sensor networks, which offer good accuracy but are limited to areas that have been prepared for that purpose, thus requiring an expensive and possibly time-consuming process. Such methods are therefore inappropriate for navigation in emergency situations since the power supply may be disturbed. Other types of solutions track the user without requiring a prepared environment. However, they may have low accuracy. Offline tracking has been proposed to increase accuracy, however this prevents users from knowing their position in real time. This paper describes a real time indoor navigation system that does not require prepared building environments and provides tracking accuracy superior to previously described tracking methods. The system uses a combination of four techniques: foot-mounted IMU (Inertial Motion Unit), ultrasonic ranging, particle filtering and model-based navigation. The very purpose of the project is to combine these four well-known techniques in a novel way to provide better indoor tracking results for pedestrians.

Language: en