Data Fusion of Dual Foot-Mounted IMU for Pedestrian Navigation

Foot-mounted inertial navigation systems are suitable as the core pedestrian navigation system in GNSS denied environment for some applications (e.g., soldier and first responder positioning). However, to date the exiting zero velocity update-based algorithm still possesses some drawbacks including systematic heading drift. A beneficial strategy is to fuse the information of two foot-mounted systems to achieve more robust and reliable performance. In this paper, a novel equality constraint method based on pedestrian footstep mode is proposed to fuse the information of two systems in the absence of any additional ranging equipment. Real field experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves the performances of both two systems.