Direction Estimation Error Model of Embedded Magnetometer in Indoor Navigation Environment

With the development of the MEMS technology, it´s becoming usual to integrate magnetometers, accelerometer and gyroscope inside the smart-phone. Therefore, the inertial hybrid localization technology is widely used to mitigate the inaccuracy in the standalone wireless localization results and improve the reliability in the absence of Radio Frequency Signal. One of the well known application is the WiFi localization assisted inertial navigation system, which is famous for its low cost, high availability and extraordinary accuracy. In this paper, we build a hybrid localization platform on the Android smart-phone and conduct measurements with different indoor scenarios. From these results, it shows that there are two error distribution existed in the direction estimation. Based on these two error distributions, we simulate performance of the hybrid localization system and compare with the typical WiFi localization. The result gives the general idea of direction estimation reliability in different environment. The proposed error model and its effect on the hybrid localization system could help performance analysis and error calibration with prior knowledge of the environment.