A Case Study On Sensors And Techniques For Pedestrian Inertial Navigation

International audienceThe interest in location based services is growing in several applications. The literature exhibits a wide spectrum of technology to complement the well-knwon limitations of satellite based positioning systems in constrained environments such as indoors or urban canyons. This paper focuses on inertial sensors and systems to locate pedestrians indoor without infrastructure. The theoretical background of a recently developped beltmounted inertial navigation system (INS) is carefully depicted here. The approach aims to facilitate the equipment and the mobility of the users while maintaining repeatable performance. Therefore, a comparison of the performance in realistic conditions is carried out between foot-mounted and belt-mounted techniques given an inertial measurement unit (IMU) commercialized by XSens. Then, this commercial IMU and an IMU based on ADXL345 and ITG3200 were compared, given the belt-mounted algorithm, in terms of positioning performance. The results, supported by dozens of experiments involving different participants, show that the belt-mounted technique is as efficient as the foot-mounted one since the average error in position is less than 2% of the travelled distance about 200m. Whereas their costs are very different, the commercial and the integrated IMU reach a similar accuracy. The beltmounted device achieve repeatable and efficient pedestrian indoor positioning in real-time with low-cost inertial sensors

The telerobotics system MT200-TAO replaces mechanical telemanipulators in COGEMA/AREVA-La Hague hot cells

International audienceWe present here for the first time the tele-robotics system for hot-cells MT200-TAO (TAO stands for Teleoperation Assistee par Ordinateur or Computer Assisted Tele-robotics), able to replace a conventional telescopic medium tele-manipulator (extension 4 m; capacity 20 kg). The system is currently under evaluation in COGEMA/AREVA- La Hague hot-cells

Belt Mounted IMU With Enhanced Distance Estimation For Pedestrian Indoor Positioning

International audienceThe approach described here attempts to overcome foot-mounted limitations, contrary to a majority of current implementations of inertial navigation systems (INS). The aim of our development is to maintain repeatable performance, especially without step counting, while carefully dealing with the mobility requirements and the computation cost. The inertial measurement unit (IMU) is belt mounted to facilitate the equipment of the user. The pedestrian trajectory is computed in real time. The resulting position is transmitted and displayed to the user on a smartphone where no specific application is installed. The description of our indoor experiments reveals the potential of this approach, in terms of positioning performance, with more than 75% of our experiments when the relative start-end error remains below 5% of the total traveled distance

INS and GNSS fusion enhancement based on a weighted reliabilities approach

International audienceThe maturity of outdoor positioning systems based on satellites encourages indoor positioning research to focus on radio technologies. However, specific infrastructures often have to be deployed in this case. Then, inertial sensors appear to be a good relay to radio systems. A system fusing INS and GNSS could thereby compute a position anywhere. Yet, taking advantage of each sensor requires to know which one is the most reliable in real-time. Therefore, a quantification of the sensors' reliabity is introduced in this paper. This approach aims at running both outdoors and indoors. Moreover, the complexity of algorithms is carefully studied here to fit the user mobility requirements. Experiments are conducted in reproducible situations and results show that taking reliabilities into account benefits the hybridization of INS and GNSS for positioning in both convenient and constrained environments

Pedestrian indoor positioning techniques: A survey

National audienceThis paper is devoted to explain the relevancy of inertial and radio hybridization to perform pedestrian positioning while addressing issues raised in the state of the art. The challenges of pedestrian indoor positioning are depicted, with an emphasize on technologies developed in some given contexts