Directional Ranging for Enhanced Performance of Aided Pedestrian Inertial Navigation

We present a ranging-based aiding method for pedestrian inertial navigation, utilizing not only ranging readouts, but also orientation of the ranging sensors. Both numerical and experimental results demonstrated improvements in navigation accuracy using the method. Kalman Filter (KF) was implemented to merge inertial navigation with Zero-Velocity-Update (ZUPT) algorithm and foot- to- foot directional ranging information. The improvement of navigation accuracy was achieved purely algorithmically without any increase in complexity of the hardware. We demonstrated experimentally that the navigation errors can be improved by about two times using the method.