Simplified Pedestrian Tracking Filters with Positioning and Foot-Mounted Inertial Sensors

Pedestrian tracking is one of the bases for many ubiquitous context-aware services, but it is still an open issue in indoor environments or when GPS estimations are not optimal. In this paper, we propose two novel different data fusion algorithms to track a pedestrian using current positioning technologies (i.e., GPS, received signal strength localization from Wi-Fi or Bluetooth networks, etc.) and low cost inertial sensors. In particular, the algorithms rely, respectively, on an extended Kalman filter (EKF) and a simplified complementary Kalman filter (KF). Both approaches have been tested with real data, showing clear accuracy improvement with respect to raw positioning data, with much reduced computational cost with respect to previous high performance solutions in literature. The fusion of both inputs is done in a loosely coupled way, so the system can adapt to the infrastructure that is available at a specific moment, delivering both outdoors and indoors solutions.