A Smartphone-Based Pedestrian Dead Reckoning System With Multiple Virtual Tracking for Indoor Navigation

In this paper, we present a pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) system with multiple virtual tracking for indoor navigation using a smartphone. In general, the heading error is one of the main factors causing positional errors in smartphone-based PDRs. To reduce it, methods using the assumption that walls and corridors are straight and either parallel or orthogonal to each other in man-made buildings have been studied. However, these methods are limited in a situation where a pedestrian does not walk down a corridor for a long period of time. In order to overcome the limitations of conventional algorithms using a dominant direction, the proposed PDR system with multiple virtual tracking uses the dominant direction as matching information only when it is reliable. If judging whether a pedestrian is walking in a dominant direction is uncertain at the current stage, the proposed algorithm also considers the previous situation by expanding the virtual tracks for various cases. The experimental results show the improved performance by comparing the proposed algorithm with a conventional one.