With the rapid development of smartphone technology, pedestrian navigation based on built-in inertial sensors in smartphones shows great application prospects. Currently, most smartphone-based pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) algorithms normally require a user to hold the phone in a fixed mode and, thus, need to correct the gyroscope heading with inputs from other sensors, which restricts the viability of pedestrian navigation significantly. In this paper, in order to improve the accuracy of the traditional step detection and step length estimation method for different users, a state transition-based step detection method and a step length estimation method using a neural network are proposed. In order to decrease the heading errors and inertial sensor errors in multi-mode system, a multi-mode intelligent recognition method based on a neural network was constructed. On this basis, we propose a heading correction method based on zero angular velocity and an overall correction method based on lateral velocity limitation (LV). Experimental results show that the maximum positioning errors obtained by the proposed algorithm are about 0.9% of the total path length. The proposed novel PDR algorithm dramatically enhances the user experience and, thus, has high value in real applications.

The combination of biomechanics and inertial pedestrian navigation research provides a very promising approach for pedestrian positioning in environments where Global Positioning System (GPS) signal is unavailable. However, in practical applications such as fire rescue and indoor security, the inertial sensor-based pedestrian navigation system is facing various challenges, especially the step length estimation errors and heading drift in running and sprint. In this paper, a trinal-node, including two thigh-worn inertial measurement units (IMU) and one waist-worn IMU, based simultaneous localization and occupation grid mapping method is proposed. Specifically, the gait detection and segmentation are realized by the zero-crossing detection of the difference of thighs pitch angle. A piecewise function between the step length and the probability distribution of waist horizontal acceleration is established to achieve accurate step length estimation both in regular walking and drastic motions. In addition, the simultaneous localization and mapping method based on occupancy grids, which involves the historic trajectory to improve the pedestrian’s pose estimation is introduced. The experiments show that the proposed trinal-node pedestrian inertial odometer can identify and segment each gait cycle in the walking, running, and sprint. The average step length estimation error is no more than 3.58% of the total travel distance in the motion speed from 1.23 m/s to 3.92 m/s. In combination with the proposed simultaneous localization and mapping method based on the occupancy grid, the localization error is less than 5 m in a single-story building of 2643.2 m${}^2$.

The indoor navigation method shows great application prospects that is based on a wearable foot-mounted inertial measurement unit and a zero-velocity update principle. Traditional navigation methods mainly support two-dimensional stable motion modes such as walking; special tasks such as rescue and disaster relief, medical search and rescue, in addition to normal walking, are usually accompanied by running, going upstairs, going downstairs and other motion modes, which will greatly affect the dynamic performance of the traditional zero-velocity update algorithm. Based on a wearable multi-node inertial sensor network, this paper presents a method of multi-motion modes recognition for indoor pedestrians based on gait segmentation and a long short-term memory artificial neural network, which improves the accuracy of multi-motion modes recognition. In view of the short effective interval of zero-velocity updates in motion modes with fast speeds such as running, different zero-velocity update detection algorithms and integrated navigation methods based on change of waist/foot headings are designed. The experimental results show that the overall recognition rate of the proposed method is 96.77%, and the navigation error is 1.26% of the total distance of the proposed method, which has good application prospects.

At present, the traditional indoor pedestrian navigation methods mainly include pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) and zero velocity update (ZUPT), but these methods have the problem of error divergence during long time navigation. To solve this problem, under the condition of not relying on the active sensing information, combined with the characteristics of particles “not going through the wall” in the indoor map building structure, an improved adaptive particle filter (PF) based on the particle “not going through the wall” method is proposed for pedestrian navigation in this paper. This method can restrain the error divergence of the navigation system for a long time. Compared to the traditional pedestrian navigation method, based on the combination of indoor map assistance (MA) and particle filter, a global search method based on indoor MA is used to solve the indoor positioning problem under the condition of the unknown initial position and heading. In order to solve the problem of low operation efficiency caused by the large number of particles in PF, a calculation method of adaptively adjusting the number of particles in the process of particle resampling is proposed. The results of the simulation data and actual test data show that the proposed indoor integrated positioning method can effectively suppress the error divergence problem of the navigation system. Under the condition that the total distance is more than 415.44 m in the indoor environment of about 2600 m², the average error and the maximum error of the position are less than two meters relative to the reference point.