In pedestrian inertial navigation, one possible placement of Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) is on a footwear. This placement allows to limit the accumulation of navigation errors due to the bias drift of inertial sensors and is generally a preferable placement of sensors to achieve the highest precision of pedestrian inertial navigation. However, inertial sensors mounted on footwear experience significantly higher accelerations and angular velocities during regular pedestrian activities than during more conventional navigation tasks, which could exceed Full Scale Range (FSR) of many commercial-off-the-shelf IMUs, therefore degrading accuracy of pedestrian navigation systems. This paper proposes a reconstruction filter to mitigate localization error in pedestrian navigation due to insufficient FSR of inertial sensors. The proposed reconstruction filter approximates immeasurable accelerometer’s signals with a triangular function and estimates the size of the triangles using a Gaussian Process regression. To evaluate performance of the proposed reconstruction filter, we conducted two series of indoor pedestrian navigation experiments with a VectorNav VN-200 IMU and an Analog Device ADIS16497-3 IMU. In the first series of experiments, forces experienced by the IMUs did not exceed the FSRs of the sensors, while in the second series, the forces surpassed the FSR of the VN-200 IMU and saturated the accelerometer’s readings. The saturated readings reduced the accuracy of estimated positions using the VN-200 by 1.34× and 3.37× along horizontal and vertical directions. When applying our proposed reconstruction filter to the saturated measurements, the navigation accuracy was increased by 5% horizontally and 50% vertically, as compared to using unreconstructed signals.

In this paper, we propose a Foot-Instability-Based Adaptive (FIBA) covariance to dynamically adjust the covariance matrix for the pseudo-zero-velocity measurements in the Zero velocity UPdaTe (ZUPT)-aided Inertial Navigation Systems (INS). The proposed ZUPT-aided INS using the FIBA covariance is implemented in an Adaptive Extended Kalman Filter (AEKF) framework, where the measurement covariance matrix is updated in each iteration according to the FIBA covariance. The FIBA covariance is designed to have a very high value during the swing phases in a gait cycle, and the value significantly decreases during the stance phases. As a result, the proposed method eliminates a need to use a binary stance phase detector in implementation of the ZUPT-aided INS. Two series of indoor pedestrian navigation experiments were conducted to investigate the navigation performance of the algorithm. In the first series of experiments, which included cases of walking and running, localization solutions produced by the system using the FIBA covariance demonstrated 36% and 64% improvements in navigation accuracy along the horizontal and vertical directions, respectively. In the second series of experiments, which included a pedestrian walking on different indoor terrains, such as flat planes, stairs, and ramps, the navigation accuracy of the system using the FIBA covariance reduced horizontal and vertical position errors by 12% and 45%, respectively, as compared to the conventional ZUPT-aided INS.