Internal positioning system based on gyroscope and accelerometer

Question

I am developing an Android application to track the internal position. My phone is a Google Nexus S with two sensors, the first of which is an accelerometer, and the second is a gyroscope.

My idea is that from the starting point (known GPS position), using 2 sensors (accelerometer for movement and gyroscope for directions), track the phone when moving. And display on the map when the user goes.

But the problem is that I have no idea how to combine both of these sensors to give me a real position?

I read some article on the Internet that talks about “kalman filters”, and after several studies I found out that this filter is very complicated / too much for me), especially for coding it in java for Android (cpu killer)

Does anyone have any experience that he can tell me about the internal positioning system using a gyroscope and accelerometer?

Answer 1

Gyroscopes and accelerometers are not enough.

You gain a position by integrating linear acceleration twice, but the error is terrible. In practice, this is useless.

Here is the explanation (Google Tech Talk) at 23:20. I highly recommend this video.

Regarding internal positioning, I found this useful:

• RSSI-based internal localization and tracking using Kalman sigma point lubricants
• Tracking pedestrians with inertial sensors mounted on shoes
• Improving pedometer performance with a single accelerometer

I have no idea how these methods will work in real applications or how to turn them into a good Android application.

A similar question. Calculation of the distance inside the building .

Answer 2

I think this is a great post answering your question. This Kalman filter combines data from accelerometers and gyroscopes. Hope this helps.

Answer 3

For some other interesting readings on new indoor positioning technologies, check out this post from Qubulus . There are several startups and research projects trying to find a good GPS replacement indoors. Attempts range from Dead Reckoning, to QR codes , to light pulses, to radio printing. It seems that any viable solution will combine several technologies (similar to how most smartphones rely on A-GPS, where satellite signal helps cell camera multilateration ).

Good luck with your application!

Answer 4

I think it's too late to answer this question, but now there is a good solution called iBeacon technology.

You can scan your iBeacon device using your smartphone, and you can get rssi from iBeacon. So, you can calculate your position with those rssi.

Answer 5

To track the internal position, starting from a certain control point, only a gyroscope and an accelerometer are not enough. Using the accelerometer you can calculate the speed, with the gyroscope you can get the direction of the mobile device, but to calculate the internal position you also need to have the direction of movement, so for this case you need to use a magnetic sensor. This approach is called the Dead Reckoning method, and it’s rather difficult to combine all 3 sensors to get the appropriate internal position. Kalman filters allow you to smooth out your measurements and filter out some noise, but this is not a method of calculating the internal position. If you want to get an internal position, you can try the iBeacon approach and the Trilateration method, there are some libraries (for example, this one ) that already have this functionality, so you can try to explore this method from such libraries.