Sensor-Aided Personal Navigation Systems for Handheld Devices

The positioning technique is the key technique for developing geographic applications, like location based services. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a common approach for positioning in vehicular navigations. Although GPS can provide absolute position information, the accuracy of GPS is not enough for personal navigations. What is worse, GPS does not work well indoors. Instead, Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) can be used to track objects with high precision, but it provides relative position information. Thus, integration of GPS and IMU can do positioning indoors and outdoors. In this paper, combining our previous work, a pedestrian tracking system for handheld devices, with GPS leads to a personal navigation system for handheld devices. The position and heading information can be calculated from this system. The system also serves a platform for many applications related to the location.