Performance Improvement of an INS by Using a Magnetometer with Pedestrian Dynamic Constraints

This paper proposes to improve the performance of a strap down inertial navigation system using a foot-mounted low-cost inertial measurement unit/magnetometer by configuring an attitude and heading reference system. To track position accurately and for attitude estimations, considering different dynamic constraints, magnetic measurement and a zero velocity update technique is used. A conventional strap down method based on integrating angular rate to determine attitude will inevitably induce long-term drift, while magnetometers are subject to shortterm orientation errors. To eliminate this accumulative error, and thus, use the navigation system for a long-duration mission, a hybrid configuration by integrating a miniature micro electromechanical system (MEMS)-based attitude and heading detector with the conventional navigation system is proposed in this paper. The attitude and heading detector is composed of three-axis MEMS accelerometers and three-axis MEMS magnetometers. With an absolute algorithm based on gravity and Earth’s magnetic field, rather than an integral algorithm, the attitude detector can obtain an absolute attitude and heading estimation without drift errors, so it can be used to adjust the attitude and orientation of the strap down system. Finally, we verify (by both formula analysis and from test results) that the accumulative errors are effectively eliminated via this hybrid scheme.