High-Accuracy Localization and Calibration for 5-DoF Indoor Magnetic Positioning Systems

Magnetic local positioning systems are a well-suited candidate for reliable indoor positioning systems, as they are robust against blocking by dielectric materials like walls or people. The system presented in this paper is implemented with a one-axis magnetic transmitter and several three-axis field sensors connected to a complete sensor network. Unfortunately, the performance of the system is severely impaired by field sensor nonidealities such as magnetic coupling of the sensor coils, coil misalignment, field sensor rotation, and unsynchronized sampling. In this paper, the overall field sensor impairments and an additive Gaussian noise model superposing the magnetic field are mathematically described. Then, a novel calibration scheme for the overall field sensor nonidealities is presented. Furthermore, a statistically optimal localization procedure coping with the field sensor nonidealities is developed. The proposed novel localization and calibration algorithms are demonstrated in a common office environment with a size of 7 m×5 m×3 m. Thereby, the calibration impressively reduces the position root-mean-square error (RMSE) from 46.8 to 10.6 cm and the angle RMSE from 24.8° to 6.1°.