Foot-mounted inertial navigation made easy

Despite being around for almost two decades, foot-mounted inertial navigation only has gotten a limited spread. Contributing factors to this are lack of suitable hardware platforms and difficult system integration. As a solution to this, we present an open-source wireless foot-mounted inertial navigation module with an intuitive and significantly simplified dead reckoning interface. The interface is motivated from statistical properties of the underlying aided inertial navigation and argued to give negligible information loss. The module consists of both a hardware platform and embedded software. Details of the platform and the software are described, and a summarizing description of how to reproduce the module are given. System integration of the module is outlined and finally, we provide a basic performance assessment of the module. In summary, the module provides a modularization of the foot-mounted inertial navigation and makes the technology significantly easier to use.