In-plane dead reckoning with knee and waist attached gyroscopes

This paper presents a Micro-Electro-Mechanical (MEM)-based system which comprises of two inertial sensors (gyroscopes) for indoor personal navigation. In this system, the position and orientation of a moving person on a flat surface (zero-slope) is determined through strategically placed sensors on the waist and knee of the human body. From the knee attached gyroscope, this system takes advantage of the repetitive angular displacement during each step of the walking person to bound the angular displacement error. Our algorithm continuously estimates the heading by integrating the measured angular rates from the waist attached gyroscope. Results show that on a flat surface, the average tracking error of 0.1935 m with a standard deviation 0.0512 m for total distance traveled of 62.32 m.