Pedestrian Dead Reckoning Method Based on Array IMU

Consumer grade micro electro mechanical system (MEMS) inertial measurement unit (IMU) suffer from severe random noise, which prevents precisely pedestrian localization. To improve the accuracy of pedestrian localization based on consumer grade MEMS IMU, we designed an array IMU comprising four consumer grade MEMS IMUs and proposed a pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) method based on the array IMU. A weighted data fusion algorithm was introduced with bias instability coefficient to improve the fusion accuracy, and the pedestrian localization algorithm was improved by incorporating pedestrian motion characteristics. A one-onekilometer pedestrian localization experiment demonstrated that the proposed PDR method based on the array IMU achieved a horizontal positioning error around 0.5%. Furthermore, the horizontal positioning error and noise coefficient of the array IMU were both reduced by 0.9 time compared to a single IMU, approaching the theoretical limit of 1 time.