Recent Advances in Pedestrian Inertial Navigation Based on Smartphone: A Review

Abstract

Indoor location-based service is a hot research topic whose application market size is expected to grow from <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\$ $ </tex-math></inline-formula> 41 billion by 2022 and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\$ $ </tex-math></inline-formula> 58 billion by 2023. As a portable communication device, smartphones have inherent advantages (such as being an essential gadget in daily life, embedding various sensors, and having powerful computing and storage ability), which provides a great opportunity for human activity recognition and pedestrian navigation. Smartphone-based pedestrian inertial navigation systems (PINSs) utilize measurements from inertial sensors embedded in smartphones to reckon the pedestrian’s location. Compared with other indoor position technologies, PINS has the advantage of autonomy and continuity, and can achieve high-precision positioning in a short period. Though various PINS methods based on the smartphone have been proposed, up-to-date review papers that summarize relevant technologies, methods, and solutions of PINS are relatively less so far in the literature. This article aims to provide an elaborated, timely, and valuable survey of different infrastructure-free pedestrian positioning and navigation techniques, including pedestrian inertial navigation methods, performance evaluation, and applications. Finally, current challenges and future research trends are discussed. This work propels a better understanding of existing pedestrian inertial positioning methods. It is helpful for researchers to further design and develop more accurate and robust pedestrian positioning and navigation systems based on inertial sensors embedded in the smartphone.