A novel height estimation approach considering barometer sensors for 3D indoor positioning

Kurzfassung

The field of infrastructure-free indoor location estimation for pedestrians is a highly active area of research. A promising approach involves using body-mounted inertial sensors combined with step-wise re-calibration, achieving meter-level accuracy in three dimensions (3D). However, certain applications require more precise vertical accuracy, and a height error of a few meters can be problematic. In this paper, we show, how exploiting the information of additional barometer sensors leads to a more accurate three-dimensional (3D)-position estimation and an overall more reliable positioning performance. To evaluate the performance of the proposed height estimation algorithm, indoor tests were conducted in a multi-level building. The height error is assessed using the known floor-to-floor distance. We compare the height error with and without the proposed height estimation algorithm, demonstrating that the proposed algorithm increases vertical positioning accuracy up to 50 %.