Ski Jumping Trajectory Reconstruction Using Wearable Sensors via Extended Rauch-Tung-Striebel Smoother with State Constraints

• Main Authors: Xiang Fang, Benedikt Grüter, Patrick Piprek, Veronica Bessone, Johannes Petrat, Florian Holzapfel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-04-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: state estimation; constrained filtering; position and velocity estimation; inertial sensors; GPS; sensors fusion
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/7/1995

To satisfy an increasing demand to reconstruct an athlete’s motion for performance analysis, this paper proposes a new method for reconstructing the position and velocity in the context of ski jumping trajectories. Therefore, state-of-the-art wearable sensors, including an inertial measurement unit, a magnetometer, and a GPS logger are used. The method employs an extended Rauch-Tung-Striebel smoother with state constraints to estimate state information offline from recorded raw measurements. In comparison to the classic inertial navigation system and GPS integration solution, the proposed method includes additional geometric shape information of the ski jumping hill, which are modeled as soft constraints and embedded into the estimation framework to improve the position and velocity estimation accuracy. Results for both simulated measurement data and real measurement data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Moreover, a comparison between jump lengths obtained from the proposed method and video recordings shows the relative root-mean-square error of the reconstructed jump length is below 1.5 m depicting the accuracy of the algorithm.