A study on position tracking system for pedestrian navigation using location and sensor information

Recently, we can use various network connections at several location using mobile terminals. Services by using location information expand for the mobile terminals. For these services, we need to estimate the location of the moving mobile devices. It is well-known that we can use the GPS in order to obtain the absolute position of the terminal. On the other hand, we can employ dead-reckoning methods adopted by the conventional car navigation system using builtin sensors to obtain the relative movement of the terminal. The latest mobile terminals such as smart phone are equipped with some sensors to capture the behavior of the terminal. In this paper, we propose a new location estimation method which combines the absolute position information by the GPS with the relative movement information by the sensors. We evaluate the proposed method in terms of the estimation accuracy by field experiments when we adopt the Kalman filter algorithm by combining the absolute location and the relative movement information. From the results of our field experiments, we show that the proposed method using the sensor information outperforms the conventional one without it.