Performance comparison of foot- and pocket-mounted inertial navigation systems

The aim of this paper is to compare two inertial navigation systems in order to identify their strengths and weaknesses as well as to propose new fusion algorithms for these systems. The goal of the fusion is to combine the best of both navigation systems in order to obtain an improved position estimation of the pedestrian. To that extent, the comparison starts with an analysis of the sensor parameters obtained with the Allan variance method. The comparison continues with the analysis of the odometries obtained with both pocket- and foot-mounted sensors. This is done by comparing the true positions of a set of ground truth points with the position estimated by the navigation systems. The analysis shows that the pocket-mounted system is reliable for step detection, whereas the foot-mounted system misses some stance phase periods. The advantage of the foot-mounted system is, for example, the good estimation of the distance. For completeness and based on the results, we propose several fusion techniques to improve the pedestrian's position estimation.