Magnetic-Based Positioning System for Moving Target With Feature Vector

Underground, indoor, and harsh environments, which are complex, mutable, and hard to model, prevent high accuracy positioning and navigation. In this paper, a novel positioning system suitable to such environments is proposed. This system is based on a magnetic feature vector integrated with a miniature inertial measurement unit (MIMU). Compared with traditional magnetic-based positioning systems (MBPS), the proposed system exhibits better robustness, and applicability, which is proved by experimental results. Its non-accumulated error characteristics and outstanding penetrability enable the system to provide long-time accurate position and attitude service in underground, indoor, and harsh environments. The experiments indicate that the expected precision of the system can reach 0.055 and 0.062 m and an angle error of 2.1° and 2.8° in line of sight (LOS) and non-line of sight (NLOS) environments, respectively, in the static experiment and 0.051 m in the moving target tracking experiment.