PDR/GNSS Fusion Algorithm Based on Joint Heading Estimation

The performance of Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) based on a smartphone is limited due to the low-cost MEMS IMU. Heading and stride length estimation tend to accumulate errors over time and those errors lead to the failure of PDR. Considering that Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) provides absolute location information in outdoor applications, and the characteristics of estimation errors of GNSS are quite different from those of PDR. In this paper, we analyse the characteristics of two different types of errors first, then we propose a fusion positioning framework that can fuse PDR and GNSS information in real time. The joint estimations of heading and stride length are also given. The experimental results show that the fusion algorithm is superior to PDR or GNSS in heading estimation, anti-multipath and noise performance.