Delay Kalman Filter to Estimate the Attitude of a Mobile Object with Indoor Magnetic Field Gradients

More and more services are based on knowing the location of pedestrians equipped with connected objects (smartphones, smartwatches, etc.). One part of the location estimation process is attitude estimation. Many algorithms have been proposed but they principally target open space areas where the local magnetic field equals the Earth’s field. Unfortunately, this approach is impossible indoors, where the use of magnetometer arrays or magnetic field gradients has been proposed. However, current approaches omit the impact of past state estimates on the current orientation estimate, especially when a reference field is computed over a sliding window. A novel Delay Kalman filter is proposed in this paper to integrate this time correlation: the Delay MAGYQ. Experimental assessment, conducted in a motion lab with a handheld inertial and magnetic mobile unit, shows that the novel filter better estimates the Euler angles of the handheld device with an 11.7° mean error on the yaw angle as compared to 16.4° with a common Additive Extended Kalman filter.