Rotating a MEMS inertial Measurement Unit for a foot-mounted Pedestrian Navigation

Pedestrian navigation especially indoors suffers from the unavailability of useful GNSS signals for positioning. Alternatively, a low-cost Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) positioning system that does not depend on the GNSS signal can be used for indoor navigation. However its performance is still compromised because of the fastaccumulating heading drift error affecting such a low-cost IMU sensor. This results in a huge positioning error when navigating more than a few seconds using only the low-cost sensor. In this study, real field trials results are presented when a foot-mounted IMU is rotated on a single axis. Two promising results have been obtained. First, it mitigates the heading drift error significantly and second, it increases the observability of IMU z-axis gyro bias error. This has resulted in a greatly reduced error in position for the low-cost pedestrian navigation system.