Smart PDR integration for ubiquitous pedestrian navigation service

Abstract

Quite recently, considerable attention has been paid to pedestrian navigation services, since they provide people with guidance and tracking information everywhere especially in an unfamiliar environment. In the literature, indoor and outdoor navigation has been widely investigated. However, studies on the continuity of pedestrian navigation service, still lacking. This paper presents a novel positioning technology selection algorithm able to integrate the pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) technique, for short-term, through the navigation process either to improve the calculation of the mobile unit's (MU) position and/or to maintain the continuity of the service. The integration of the PDR is inferred based on the fuzzy logic approach. In fact, the proposed algorithm defines a fuzzy variable called “margin” which identifies four different states, namely, confidence, intermediate, confusion and critic. The PDR technique is only incorporated in the last two states in two ways: either fused with the used radio frequency (RF) positioning technology or stand-alone if no RF technology is available. The algorithm performance is evaluated based on an empirical study.