Performance testing of PDR using common sensors on a smartphone

Personal positioning system needs portable, flexible, and inexpensive sensor. Nowadays, most of smartphones in the market have been equipped with accelerometer and magnetometer to support some basic features. Utilizing these sensors as a positioning system is an interesting proposition because it doesn´t depend on outside infrastructures and can be widely used by many people with their smartphone. In this study, accelerometer and magnetometer sensor are used to estimate pedestrian positions based on dead reckoning method. Dead reckoning is a positioning method where subsequent position is estimated by adding displacement to the previous position. Moreover, our system is not only utilizing smartphone as an input sensor, but also implementing PDR (Pedestrian Dead Reckoning) in real-time mode in the smartphone that has limited resources. Our experiment was performed with 30 test subjects, walking in 3 tracks with distances of 51.54m, 77.79m, and 82.67m respectively. The result shows that the system was able to estimate user position with average error less than 4.4% of total distance.