IMPROVEMENT OF PEDESTRIAN DEAD RECKONING ALGORITHM FOR INDOOR POSITIONING BY USING STEP LENGTH ESTIMATION

Abstract. Pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) can solve the position information by its inertial measurement unit (IMU), which is a method to achieve indoor autonomous positioning without deploying positioning base stations in advance. However, affected by the accumulated error, the positioning accuracy will decrease with the increase of the moving distance. To improve the indoor positioning accuracy, the step length estimation of PDR is improved. A PDR method combining the information on walking frequency, acceleration variance, and fixed step is proposed. Firstly, the pedestrian's walking steps are detected and estimated by the threshold peak method; secondly, the step frequency and acceleration variance are calculated, and the step length estimation model is fitted with the fixed step length of the pedestrian to estimate the step length of each step; then, the fusion algorithm of magnetometer, accelerometer, and gyroscope are used to estimate the heading; finally, combined with the step number, step length, and heading angle, the position information of walking is calculated by dead reckoning. The experimental results show that in the practical distance of 42.6 m, the accuracy of dead reckoning distance based on the combination of step frequency, acceleration variance, and fixed step length can reach 98.47%, which is better than the fixed step length and linear step length version, 5.09% higher than the linear step length and 0.35% higher than the fixed step length version.