New-Tech Europe | December 2016 | Didital Edition

contribution to the task of determining useful position information. 3. Industrial MEMS inertial measurement units (IMUs) are advancing in performance, size, cost-effectiveness, and integration (no compromise) to uniquely enable critical applications such as first responder. This works reasonably well outside, but in a challenged urban environment or indoors, GPS isn’t available. Couple that with the poor quality of other available sensors, and it leaves a large gap or “uncertainty” in the quality of the position information. Advanced filters and algorithms are typically employed to merge these sensors, but without either additional sensors or better-quality sensors, the software does little to actually close the uncertainty gap. Ultimately, it significantly lowers the confidence in the reported position. This is conceptually illustrated in Fig. 4. 4. Smartphone-based pedestrian navigation relies primarily on GPS, with supplemental but not optimized pre-embedded sensors. This leaves a significant gap in high-confidence, or reliable, coverage of motion detection, which algorithms alone cannot fix. In contrast, the industrial dead- reckoning scenario, such as first responder, is designed for performance, with system definition and component selection guided by specific accuracy requirements. Significantly better-quality inertial

Figure 3. Industrial MEMS inertial measurement units (IMUs) are advancing in performance, size, cost-effectiveness, and integration (no compromise) to uniquely enable critical applications such as first responder

Figure 4. Smartphone-based pedestrian navigation relies primarily on GPS, with supplemental but not optimized pre-embedded sensors. This leaves a significant gap in high-confidence, or reliable, coverage of motion detection, which algorithms alone cannot fix

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