Development of a low cost wireless IMU using MEMS sensors for pedestrian navigation

This paper describes the design and development of a low cost Bluetooth based wireless inertial measurement unit (WIMU) for pedestrian navigation applications (PNS). Our aim is to use commercially available micro electromechanical system (MEMS) based inertial sensors to develop a miniature WIMU for GPS denied navigation applications including PNS. The challenging issues with noisy MEMS sensors and their integration to obtain attitude information is handled carefully by using sensor fusion algorithm while ensuring as minimum delay as possible for real time decision. The results have been compared with the sensor suite available in the Samsung Galaxy s5 smart phone and found to accurately following the trends in roll, pitch, yaw angles as well as x-y-z accelerations.