An Improved Heuristic Drift Elimination Method for Indoor Pedestrian Positioning

Indoor positioning is currently a research hotspot. In recent years, Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) has been widely used in indoor positioning. However, the positioning error caused by heading drifts will accumulate as the walking distance increases, so some methods need to be used to correct the heading angle. Heuristic Drift Elimination (HDE) is an effective heading correction algorithm, which only uses the information of a building’s dominant directions to reduce the heading error, but it does not apply to the non-dominant direction condition. In this paper, we propose a heading drift suppressing method for the limitation of HDE. Firstly, the method constructs membership functions to judge the pedestrian’s motion according to the result of comprehensive evaluation. Then, it further determines by a threshold condition whether the pedestrian walks along the dominant directions, and a heading error measurement is introduced for heading correction. Finally, we verify by experiments that the proposed method can correct heading angles properly for different conditions, which indicates an adaptability to the environment.