Pedestrian Tracking with Shoe-Mounted Inertial Sensors

  • Authors:
  • Eric Foxlin

  • Affiliations:
  • Isense

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2005

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

One of the main obstacles to the real-world deployment of location-sensitive wearable computing, including mixed reality, is that current position-tracking technologies require an instrumented, marked, or premapped environment, which is impractical in many applications. This article presents a pedestrian inertial navigation device called NavShoe, which can work in arbitrary unprepared indoor/outdoor environments. It consists of a miniature low-power inertial/magnetometer package tucked into the shoelaces of one foot, wirelessly coupled to a PDA that runs software to fuse inertial, geomagnetic, and optional GPS measurements to derive an optimal navigation pose solution. Novel algorithms are presented to accurately calibrate the compass for compensation of hard-iron and soft-iron distortions, and then align it to true north using GPS transfer alignment. Options are discussed for alternative aiding sensors indoors such as computer vision, map-correlation, and local landmark sensors. Finally, an approach is discussed to use the foot-mounted precision attitude reference as an alignment source for precision 6-DOF trackers of head-mounted and handheld implements such as augmented reality displays.