Week 4 Summary
Pedestrian Tracking with Shoe-Mounted Inertial Sensors
The paper describes the NavShoe system suitable for position tracking based on inertial sensing. Real world deployment of location sensors then required an instrumented or marked environment. The Navshoe system overcomes this problem by enabling position tracking without preparing any indoor or outdoor setting. It basically uses a miniature inertial/magnetometer package wirelessly coupled to a PDA. Its key feature is that it works in environments both with and without GPS support, it is low power and low cost. Additionally the device is so small (1 inch * 1 inch) that it can be easily slipped under users shoelaces. It is quite accurate with a 6 meter root mean square accuracy. It actually overcomes the cubic in time error growth by detecting only the stance phase and applying zero velocity updates as psuedomeasurements into the Extended Kalman Filter error corrector. This results in linear error accumulation with the number of steps. This makes the NavShoe system accurate enough for moderate distances and for longer distances it can be used in conjunction with GPS to provide a hybrid GPS/inertial solution which is more accurate. It is thus suitable for rescuing firefighters, navigation assistance,mobile 3d audio and other mixed or AR applications.
Among several others one question that I would like to discuss is that other than indoor emergency situations is such accurate position tracking actually required? Isnt the GPS technology advance enough to meet most of our needs.
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