Sensor fusion for magneto-inductive navigation

Johan Wahlström, Manon Kok, Pedro Porto Buarque de Gusmão, Traian E. Abrudan, Niki Trigoni, Andrew Markham

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)
87 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Magneto-inductive navigation is an inexpensive and easily deployable solution to many of today’s navigation problems. By utilizing very low frequency magnetic fields, magneto-inductive technology circumvents the problems with attenuation and multipath that often plague competing modalities. Using triaxial transmitter and receiver coils, it is possible to compute position and orientation estimates in three dimensions. However, in many situations, additional information is available that constrains the set of possible solutions. For example, the receiver may be known to be coplanar with the transmitter, or orientation information may be available from inertial sensors. We employ a maximum a posteriori estimator to fuse magneto-inductive signals with such complementary information. Further, we derive the Cramér-Rao bound for the position estimates and investigate the problem of detecting distortions caused by ferrous material. The performance of the estimator is compared to the Cramér-Rao bound and a state-of-the-art estimator using both simulations and real-world data. By fusing magneto-inductive signals with accelerometer measurements, the median position error is reduced almost by a factor of two.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)386-396
JournalIEEE Sensors Journal
Volume20
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Magnetometers
  • Navigation
  • Magnetic moments
  • Transmitters
  • Magnetic resonance imaging
  • Estimation
  • Receivers

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