Strap-down Pedestrian Dead-Reckoning system

This paper presents a waist-worn Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) System that requires minimal end-user calibration. The PDR system is based on an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) comprising of a tri-axial accelerometer, a tri-axial magnetometer and a tri-axial gyroscope. We propose a novel heading estimation scheme using a quaternion-based extended Kalman filter (EKF) that estimates magnetic disturbances and corrects for them. Accelerometer measurements are used to detect step events and to estimate step lengths. Experimental results show that a relative distance error of about 3% to 8% can be obtained using our methods.