An IMU-based positioning system using QR-code assisting for indoor navigation

In this paper, a positioning scheme combining inertial measurement unit (IMU) observation with QR code recognition is proposed to improve the location accuracy in an indoor environment. For the location-estimation technique, the proposed positioning scheme based on IMU observations is handled by the dead-reckoning (DR) algorithm; in terms of a QR-code-assisted calibration technique, the proposed approach is an accuracy enhancement procedure that effectively reduces the error propagation caused by DR approach. Namely, with the assisting approach to recognize the locations of the QR-code-reference nodes as landmarks, a DR-based scheme using the landmark information can calibrate the estimated location, and then the error propagation effect is reduced. The experimental results demonstrate that the location based on the proposed approach have much lower location errors in an IMU positioning platform. As compared with the non-QR-code-assisted approach, the proposed algorithm can achieve reasonably good performance.