Abstract

J. Windau, L. Itti, Walking compass with head-mounted IMU sensor, In: Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2016. [2016 acceptance rate: 34.7%] (Cited by 34)

Abstract: Emerging wearable technologies offer new sensor placement options on the human body. Particularly, head-mounted glass-wear opens up new data capturing possibilities directly from the human head. This allows exploring new cyber-robotics algorithms (robotics sensors and human motor plant). Glass-wear systems, however, require additional compensation for head motions that will affect the captured sensor data. Particularly, pedestrian dead-reckoning (PDR), activity recognition, and other applications are limited or restricted when head-mounted sensors are used, because of possible confusion between head and body movements. Thus, previous PDR approaches typically required to keep the head pointing direction aligned with the walking direction to avoid positional errors. This paper presents a head-mounted orientation system (HOS) that identifies and filters out interfering head motions in 3 steps. Step 1 transforms inertial sensor data into a stable normalized coordinate system (roll/pitch motion compensated). Step 2 compares walking patterns before and after a rotating motion. Step 3 eliminates interfering head motions from sensor data by dynamically adjusting the noise parameters of the extended Kalman filter. HOS has been implemented on a Google Glass platform and achieved high accuracy in tracking a person’s path even in the presence of head movements (within 2.5% of traveled distance) when tested in multiple real-world scenarios. By eliminating head motions, HOS not only enables accurate PDR, but also facilitates the task for downstream activity recognition algorithms.

Themes: Beobots