GPS-assisted Indoor Pedestrian Dead Reckoning

Abstract

Indoor pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) using embedded inertial sensors in smartphones has been actively studied in the ubicomp community. However, PDR relying only on inertial sensors suffers from the accumulation of errors from the sensors. Researchers have employed various indoor landmarks detectable by smartphone sensors such as magnetic fingerprints caused by elevators and Bluetooth signals from beacons with known coordinates to compensate for the errors. This study proposes a new type of indoor landmark that does not require additional device installation, e.g., beacons, and training data collection in a target environment, e.g., magnetic fingerprints, unlike existing landmarks. This study proposes the use of GPS signals received by a smartphone to correct the accumulated errors of the PDR. While it is impossible to locate the smartphone indoors using GPS satellites, the smartphone can receive signals at a window-side area through windows from satellites aligned with the orientation of the window normal. Based on this idea, we design a machine-learning-based module for detecting the proximity of a user to a window and the orientation of the window, which enables us to roughly determine the absolute coordinates of the smartphone and to correct the accumulated errors by referring to positions of window-side areas found in the floor plan of the environment. A key technical contribution of this study is designing the module, such that it can be trained based on data from environments other than the target environment yet work in any environment by extracting GPS-related information independent of wall orientation. We evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed method using sensor data collected in real environments.