A Magnetic Ranging-Aided Dead-Reckoning Positioning System for Pedestrian Applications

Abstract

This paper investigates the applicability of a developed Magnetic Positioning System (MPS) as a support for a dead-reckoning inertial navigation system (DR-INS) for pedestrian applications. The integrated system combines the complementary properties of the separate systems, operating over long periods of time and in cluttered indoor areas with partial nonline-of-sight conditions. The obtained results show that the proposed approach can effectively improve the coverage area of the MPS and the operation time with bounded errors of the DR-INS. In particular, a solution that provides bounded position errors of 1–2 m over significantly long periods of time up to 45 min, in realistic indoor environments, is demonstrated. Moreover, system applicability is also shown in those scenarios where arbitrary orientations of the MPS mobile node are considered and an MPS position estimate is not available due to less than three distance measurements.