Abstract
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 â\euro” the very limited allowable length of the
exploration phase during which unvisited areas are mapped.