Ultrasound-aided pedestrian dead reckoning for indoor navigation

Ad hoc solutions for tracking and providing navigation sup-port to emergency response teams is an important and safety-critical challenge. We propose a navigation system based on a combination of foot-mounted inertial sensors and ul-trasound beacons. We evaluate experimentally the perfor-mance of our dead reckoning system in different environ-ments and for different trail topologies. The inherent drift observed in dead reckoning is addressed by deploying ultra-sound beacons as landmarks. We study through simulations the use of the proposed approach in guiding a person along a defined path. Simulation results show that satisfactory guidance perfor-mance is achieved despite noisy ultrasound measurements, magnetic interference and uncertainty in ultrasound node locations. The models used for the simulations are based on experimental data and the authors ’ experience with actual sensors. The simulation results will be used to inform future development of a full real time system. Categories and Subject Descriptors: C.3 [Special-Purpose and Application-Based Systems]: Real-time and embedded systems General Terms: algorithms, experimentation, measure-ment.