MAE Graduate Student Wins Conference Award

April 21, 2020 – Mechanical and aerospace engineering graduate student Yusheng Wang recently won the Best Post-Graduate Presentation Award at the 22nd annual Conference of Young Scientists on Navigation and Motion Control.  

Wang was scheduled to deliver his presentation, Pedestrian Inertial Navigation with Foot-Mounted Inertial Measurement Unit, in St. Petersburg, Russia, last month. Instead, he had to present over Skype (at 1 a.m. Pacific Standard Time) due to the coronavirus pandemic. The study, which was co-authored with Wang’s adviser, Andrei M. Shkel, presented the effects of noise from inertial measurement units on navigation solution uncertainty, using Zero-Velocity-Update (ZUPT) to improve the accuracy of pedestrian inertial navigation. This well-known approach is able to minimize errors by resetting the velocity to zero when the foot does not move with respect to the ground.

GPS is one of the most common ways to navigate. However, in some environments, such as deep urban areas, indoors or underground, GPS signals are not available. In this case, inertial navigation, which uses sensors including accelerometers and gyroscopes, is used instead. In recent years, inertial navigation has been of interest to many fields, including human health monitoring, personal indoor navigation and localization for first responder systems.

“We fixed inertial sensors on the foot of our subject,” said Wang. “In this case, the sensors can detect when the foot is on the floor while the subject walks or runs, and the system can use this information to compensate for navigation errors, therefore achieving high accuracy during navigation.”

Wang, who is affiliated with UCI’s Microsystems Laboratory, researches inertial sensors, inertial navigation and sensor fusion. “I’d like to thank my adviser for insightful guidance and continuous support in this study, and my lab mates for invaluable discussions and mutual encouragement,” he said.

– Megan Lohre