Coupled laser inertial navigation system for pedestrian tracking

This paper presents a method for indoor pedestrian tracking using inertial sensing and a laser scanner (Light Detection and Ranging LIDAR). The zero velocity updating technique[2], which is used to enhance the performances of an inertial sensing sensor mounted on the foot, cannot observe heading, resulting in an horizontal position drift. A Lidar mounted on the head is used as a complementary technique to correct heading. The well known Iterative Closest Point (ICP) [5] algorithm is adapted for our application to treat captured laser scans at given instances that we call middle of foot stance phases. The detection process of those instances will be presented, which is followed by a Lidar-inertial coupling: the corrected position delivered by the ICP algorithm is forwarded as a position fix to the extended Kalman filter treating the inertial sensor data on the foot, and thus to compensate its drift. First results are presented to compare inertial navigation against Lidar-inertial coupled navigation.