UWB Ranging Aided Inertial Pedestrian Positioning With Backtrack

Foot-mounted pedestrian indoor positioning is very suitable for emergency response missions such as search and rescue missions. With some aiding information, such as ultra-wideband (UWB)-based ranging measurements, the inertial generated trajectories can be calibrated. However, in situations when the range is not available for a long duration, the trajectories may result in sudden changes and large errors. This article proposes to adopt particle filter (PF)-based smoothing techniques, including forward-backward smoothing (FBS) and backward simulation (BS), to cope with such situations. Both the results from simulation and real-scenario experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method in avoiding sudden changes in trajectories and improving average positioning accuracy.