TechRxiv

MAINS: A Magnetic Field Aided Inertial Navigation System for Indoor Positioning

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posted on 2023-12-07, 03:59 authored by Chuan HuangChuan Huang, Gustaf Hendeby, Christophe Prieur, Hassen Fourati, Isaac Skog

A Magnetic field Aided Inertial Navigation System (MAINS) for indoor navigation is proposed in this paper. MAINS leverages an array of magnetometers to measure spatial variations in the magnetic field, which are then used to estimate the displacement and orientation changes of the system, thereby aiding the inertial navigation system (INS). Experiments show that MAINS significantly outperforms the stand-alone INS, demonstrating a remarkable two orders of magnitude reduction in position error. Furthermore, when compared to the state-of-the-art magnetic-field-aided navigation approach, the proposed method exhibits slightly improved horizontal position accuracy. On the other hand, it has noticeably larger vertical error on datasets with large magnetic field variations. However, one of the main advantages of MAINS compared to the state-of-the-art is that it enables flexible sensor configurations. The experimental results show that the position error after 2 minutes of navigation in most cases is less than 3 meters when using an array of 30 magnetometers. Thus, the proposed navigation solution has the potential to solve one of the key challenges faced with current magnetic-field simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) solutions — the very limited allowable length of the exploration phase during which unvisited areas are mapped.

Funding

Tensor-field based localization

Swedish Research Council

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History

Email Address of Submitting Author

chuan.huang@liu.se

Submitting Author's Institution

Linköping University

Submitting Author's Country

  • Sweden

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