Mobile platform for motion capture of locomotion over long distances

Motion capture is usually performed on only a few steps of over-ground locomotion, limited by the finite sensing volume of most capture systems. This makes it difficult to evaluate walking over longer distances, or in a natural environment outside the laboratory. Here we show that motion capture may be performed relative to a mobile platform, such as a wheeled cart that is moved with the walking subject. To determine the person’s absolute displacement in space, the cart’s own motion must be localized. We present three localization methods and evaluate their performance. The first detects cart motion solely from the relative motion of the subject’s feet during walking. The others use sensed motion of the cart’s wheels to perform odometry, with and without an additional gyroscope to enhance sensitivity to turning about the vertical axis. We show that such methods are practical to implement, and with present-day sensors can yield accuracy of better than 1% over arbitrary distances.