A Shin-Mounted Inertial Navigation System for Pedestrian Walking and Running Gait

Accurately and reliably estimating the position of pedestrians with complex gaits is a primary challenge for current positioning solutions using wearable inertial sensors. This article proposes a novel zero-velocity detection method tailored for walking and running using a shin-mounted IMU, resulting in a shin-mounted inertial navigation system (Shin-INS) suitable for pedestrians with walking and running gaits. The proposed method divides pedestrian motion into stationary, walking, and running stages, and designs zero-velocity detection signal features and methods according to the gait. On this basis, the zero-velocity update technique (ZUPT) and the zero-position increment update method are used to achieve reliable pedestrian position estimation. We conducted over 30 tests, encompassing various running speeds, trajectory shapes, and transitions between walking and running gaits. The results demonstrate that the proposed method accurately estimates pedestrian motion trajectories, reducing positioning errors by more than 30% under conditions of walking and running gait transitions compared to the foot-mounted INS (Foot-INS) based on adaptive threshold.