Indoor Positioning Technology Integrating Pedestrian Dead Reckoning and WiFi Fingerprinting Based on EKF with Adaptive Error Covariance

Abstract

Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) methods using initial sensors are being studied to provide the location information of smart device users in indoor environments where satellite signals are not available. PDR can continuously estimate the location of a pedestrian regardless of the walking environment, but has the disadvantage of accumulating errors over time. Unlike this, WiFi signal-based wireless positioning technology does not accumulate errors over time, but can provide positioning information only where infrastructure is installed. It also shows different positioning performance depending on the environment. In this paper, an integrated positioning technology integrating two positioning techniques with different error characteristics is proposed. A technique for correcting the error of PDR was designed by using the location information obtained through WiFi Measurement-based fingerprinting as the measurement of Extended Kalman Filte (EKF). Here, a technique is used to variably calculate the error covariance of the filter measurements using the WiFi Fingerprinting DB and apply it to the filter. The performance of the proposed positioning technology is verified through an experiment. The error characteristics of the PDR and WiFi Fingerprinting techniques are analyzed through the experimental results. In addition, it is confirmed that the PDR error is effectively compensated by adaptively utilizing the WiFi signal to the environment through the EKF to which the adaptive error covariance proposed in this paper is applied.