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A reliable indoor positioning system providing high accuracy has the potential to increase the safety of first responders and military personnel significantly. To enable navigation in a broad range of environments and obtain more accurate and robust positioning results, we propose a multi-sensor fusion approach. We describe and evaluate a positioning system, based on sensor fusion between a foot-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a camera-based system for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). The complete system provides accurate navigation in many relevant environments without depending on preinstalled infrastructure. The camera-based system uses both inertial measurements and visual data, thereby enabling navigation also in environments and scenarios where one of the sensors provides unreliable data during a few seconds. When sufficient light is available, the camera-based system generally provides good performance. The foot-mounted system provides accurate positioning when distinct steps can be detected, e.g., during walking and running, even in dark or smoke-filled environments. By combining the two systems, the integrated positioning system can be expected to enable accurate navigation in almost all kinds of environments and scenarios. In this paper we present results from initial tests, which show that the proposed sensor fusion improves the navigation solution considerably in scenarios where either the foot-mounted or camera-based system is unable to navigate on its own.
Emilsson et al. (Mon,) studied this question.