Paper
Seamless Outdoor-Indoor Pedestrian Positioning System with GNSS/UWB/IMU Fusion: A Comparison of EKF, FGO, and PF
Authors
Jiaqiang Zhang, Xianjia Yu, Sier Ha, Paola Torrico Moron, Sahar Salimpour, Farhad Kerama, Haizhou Zhang, Tomi Westerlund
Abstract
Accurate and continuous pedestrian positioning across outdoor-indoor environments remains challenging because GNSS, UWB, and inertial PDR are complementary yet individually fragile under signal blockage, multipath, and drift. This paper presents a unified GNSS/UWB/IMU fusion framework for seamless pedestrian localization and provides a controlled comparison of three probabilistic back-ends: an error-state extended Kalman filter, sliding-window factor graph optimization, and a particle filter. The system uses chest-mounted IMU-based PDR as the motion backbone and integrates absolute updates from GNSS outdoors and UWB indoors. To enhance transition robustness and mitigate urban GNSS degradation, we introduce a lightweight map-based feasibility constraint derived from OpenStreetMap building footprints, treating most building interiors as non-navigable while allowing motion inside a designated UWB-instrumented building. The framework is implemented in ROS 2 and runs in real time on a wearable platform, with visualization in Foxglove. We evaluate three scenarios: indoor (UWB+PDR), outdoor (GNSS+PDR), and seamless outdoor-indoor (GNSS+UWB+PDR). Results show that the ESKF provides the most consistent overall performance in our implementation.