%0 Journal Article
%T Low-Cost MEMS-Based Pedestrian Navigation Technique for GPS-Denied Areas
%A Abdelrahman Ali
%A Naser El-Sheimy
%J Journal of Sensors
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/197090
%X The progress in the micro electro mechanical system (MEMS) sensors technology in size, cost, weight, and power consumption allows for new research opportunities in the navigation field. Today, most of smartphones, tablets, and other handheld devices are fully packed with the required sensors for any navigation system such as GPS, gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, and pressure sensors. For seamless navigation, the sensors¡¯ signal quality and the sensors availability are major challenges. Heading estimation is a fundamental challenge in the GPS-denied environments; therefore, targeting accurate attitude estimation is considered significant contribution to the overall navigation error. For that end, this research targets an improved pedestrian navigation by developing sensors fusion technique to exploit the gyroscope, magnetometer, and accelerometer data for device attitude estimation in the different environments based on quaternion mechanization. Results indicate that the improvement in the traveled distance and the heading estimations is capable of reducing the overall position error to be less than 15£¿m in the harsh environments. 1. Introduction Personal navigation requires technologies that are immune to signal obstructions and fading. One of the major challenges is obtaining a good heading solution in different environments and for different user positions without external absolute reference signals. Part of this challenge arises from the complexity and freedom of movement of a typical handheld user where the heading observability considerably degrades in low-speed walking, making this problem even more challenging. However, for short periods, the relative attitude and heading information is quite reliable. Self-contained systems requiring minimal infrastructure, for example, inertial measurement units (IMUs), stand as a viable option, since pedestrian navigation is not only focused on outdoor navigation but also on indoor navigation. Nowadays, most of the smartphones are programmable and equipped with self-contained, low cost, small size, and power-efficient sensors, such as magnetometers, gyroscopes, and accelerometers. Hence, integrating IMUs navigation solution with a magnetometer-based heading can play an important role in pedestrian navigation in all environments. In the current state of the art in MEMS technology, the accuracy of gyroscopes is not good enough for deriving an absolute heading or relative heading over longer durations of time. However, for short periods, the relative attitude information is quite reliable. Magnetometers,
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/js/2013/197090/