Drift reduction in IMU-only pedestrian navigation system in unstructured environment

This paper aims at developing algorithmic approach to reduce the error drift in navigation information using only single motion sensor i.e. inertial measurement unit (IMU) in an unstructured environment. The target application is pedestrian navigation system (PNS), but these algorithms are general for other applications too involving autonomous systems. A MEMS IMU is mounted on the foot of the agent in order to get benefit of known walking patterns of the wearer. Algorithms are derived based on motion constraints of human walking and applied to reduce the inherent error drift in inertial navigation systems (INS). Experiments are conducted in indoor/outdoor unstructured environment to validate this algorithmic approach and shown that without using any other sensors and any other pre-conditions on the environment; we can reduce navigation errors significantly only by taking into account the motion constraints of human walking.