Ship-board pedestrian positioning method by integrating Dead Reckoning and Wireless Sensor Networks

Aimed at ship-board pedestrian positioning, this paper put forward a low-cost positioning method by integrating Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). In this paper, a stable attitude estimator method has been designed through the calibration of IMU´s components -- accelerometer, gyroscopes and magnetometers. Apart from this, a pedestrian dead reckoning system has been achieved through detailed analysis of step detection which estimated the step length. Furthermore, with ship-board Wireless Sensor Networks, an Extended Kalman Filter in this positioning method will be applied to fuse the information if the signal of WSN beacon is available. If the signal of WSN beacon is unavailable, the PDR system will continue working independently and the Extended Kalman Filter is applied as fusion scheme. Meanwhile, experiments were carried out in simulative ship environment. When the tester walked with the PDR system receiving correction signals of WSN, the average positioning error was 1.1 meter and the maximum error was 2meter. The experimental results have shown that the proposed scheme can fulfill the demand of pedestrian positioning in nautical situation.