A Magnetic field Aided Inertial Navigation System (MAINS) for indoor navigation is proposed in this paper. MAINS leverages an array of magnetometers to measure spatial variations in the magnetic field, which are then used to estimate the displacement and orientation changes of the system, thereby aiding the inertial navigation system (INS). Experiments show that MAINS significantly outperforms the stand-alone INS, demonstrating a remarkable two orders of magnitude reduction in position error. Furthermore, when compared to the state-of-the-art magnetic-field-aided navigation approach, the proposed method exhibits slightly improved horizontal position accuracy. On the other hand, it has noticeably larger vertical error on datasets with large magnetic field variations. However, one of the main advantages of MAINS compared to the state-of-the-art is that it enables flexible sensor configurations. The experimental results show that the position error after 2 minutes of navigation in most cases is less than 3 meters when using an array of 30 magnetometers. Thus, the proposed navigation solution has the potential to solve one of the key challenges faced with current magnetic-field simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) solutions: the very limited allowable length of the exploration phase during which unvisited areas are mapped.

翻译：本文提出了一种用于室内导航的磁场辅助惯性导航系统（MAINS）。MAINS利用磁力计阵列测量磁场的空间变化，进而估计系统的位移和方向变化，从而辅助惯性导航系统（INS）。实验表明，MAINS显著优于独立INS，位置误差降低了两个数量级。此外，与最先进的磁场辅助导航方法相比，所提方法在水平位置精度上略有提升。然而，在磁场变化较大的数据集上，其垂直误差明显更大。但MAINS相对于最先进方法的主要优势之一在于其支持灵活的传感器配置。实验结果显示，在使用30个磁力计阵列的情况下，大多数场景下导航2分钟后的位置误差小于3米。因此，所提出的导航方案有望解决当前磁场同时定位与映射（SLAM）方案面临的关键挑战之一：探索阶段（即映射未访问区域）的允许长度极为有限。