Indoor navigation - applications for intertial sensors

Inertial sensors have a great potential to be used in navigation applications. The current field of main applications is the military sector and the civil navigation of vehicles, ships and aircrafts. The Fraunhofer TEG has assembled a very small size interial measurement unit and has studied its performance. Unlike traditional navigation applications this system has been developed to track the position and orientation of hand-held devices. For these applications the prior knowledge of the environment and the usage of the system can be applied to develop specific algorithms. The basic algorithms for the data analysis of this 6 degrees of freedom solution have been already realised. Through this it has been shown that low-cost miniaturised intertial systems have sufficient accuracy if additional information of the position or orientation of an object is available. In this paper the advantages and disadvantages of inertial sensors for indoor navigation of hand-held devices will be discussed. Recommendations will be given on how the inertial sensors can be integrated in a navigation unit, which itself can be part of a small hand-held device. The new application specific algorithms will be briefly explaind on the development of an acceleration based computer mouse. Additionally new and innovative applications for interial sensors will be introduced and an outline of further developments at Fraunhofer TEG will be given