Adaptative pedestrian displacement estimation with a smartphone

Pedestrian dead reckoning is one of the most promising processing strategies of inertial signals collected with a smartphone for autonomous indoor personal navigation. When the sensors are held in hand, step length models are usually used to estimate the walking distance. They combine stride frequency with a finite number of physiological and descriptive parameters that are calibrated with training data for each person. But even under steady conditions, several physiological conditions are impacting the walking gait and consequently these parameters. Frequent calibration is needed to tune these models prior to relying on free inertial navigation solutions in indoor locations. Two hybridization filters are proposed for calibrating the step length model and estimating the navigation solution. They integrate either GNSS standalone positions or GNSS Doppler depending on the coupling level. A data collection performed with four test subjects show the variations of these parameters for the same person during his journey and effectiveness of the calibration for improving the estimation of walking distances. Thanks to the new filters, the error on the travelled distance gets reduced to 7% with the loosely coupled filter and 2% with the tightly coupled filter.