Integrity monitoring for UWB/INS tightly coupled pedestrian indoor scenarios

In this paper a tightly coupled UWB/INS system for pedestrian indoor applications is presented. In indoor environments wireless signal outage and severe multipath propagation very often lead to ranging errors and make pure UWB-based localization barely possible. On the other hand inertial sensor based systems (INS) are known for their drift with time. The integration of those two systems will allow to profit from their advantages. For the sensor data fusion the tightly coupled approach and integrity monitoring are crucial factors for a robust implementation. One possibility is the Time of Arrival (ToA) approach where the user clock bias and drift are modeled and estimated in the navigation filter. The other possibility is the Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) approach, where the range measurements are differenced totally eliminating the clock error. If user/transmitter clocks do not follow the clock drift model very well, it is better to apply the TDoA approach. For time of arrival applications, innovation based integrity monitoring is standard. However for the use of Time Difference of Arrival measurements (TDoA) in this paper an Innovation Based Integrity Monitoring (IBIM) method is presented. This is done to determine and omit all TDoA measurement combinations including the incorrect UWB receivers. This novel approach is verified in a simulation environment. A user trajectory and inertial data are provided by a custom developed pedestrian walk generator, based on real measurement data. The UWB data is generated by a wave propagation simulator for the given indoor trajectory.