Linear acceleration direction to track upward and downward movement of phone

Question

I am trying to track the movement of the device only on the vertical direction, i.e. upward and downward movement. This should be irrespective of the orientation of the device. Things that i already know or have tried are these

1. Linear acceleration is given by sensor TYPE_LINEAR_ACCELERATION and the axes is the phone axes and hence tracking any particular axes does not make a difference.

2. I tried applying transpose or inverse of rotation vector( inverse or transpose for the rotation vector are same) and then tried tracking the z direction of the linear acceleration vector. Does not seem to help.

3. I am trying to do a dot product with gravity values (TYPE_GRAVITY) to get the direction of the acceleration but it seems to be error prone. Even when i move my device swiftly up, it says going down.

I will outline this method here

dotProduct = vectorA[0]*vectorB[0]+vectorA[1]*vectorB[1] + vectorA[2]*vectorB[2];    
cosineVal = dotProduct/(|vectorA|*|vectorB|)    
if(cosineVal > 0 ) down else Up.

What is the flaw with the method ? Please help, I have been stuck on this for some time now.

Answer 1

As I see it, in the 3rd method you trying to find the cos of angle between two vectors (gravity vector and acceleration vector). And the idea is if the angle is close to 180 degrees you have up movement, if angle is close to 0 degrees you have down movement. Cosine is function that has positive value when angle is from -90 to 90 degrees. So when your cosineVal value is positive it means phone is going down and even if cosineVal closer to 1 movement is straight down. So it is true vice versa. When cosine is negative ( from 90 degrees to 270) you have up movement.

Probably you can get vectors from Sensor.TYPE_ACCELEROMETER from https://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/SensorEvent.html#values there you have gravity vector and acceleration vector.
I made a code snippet below you can try.

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity implements SensorEventListener {
    private float[] gravity = new float[3];
    private float[] linear_acceleration = new float[3];

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);
        SensorManager mSensorManager = (SensorManager) getSystemService(SENSOR_SERVICE);
        Sensor mAccelerometer = mSensorManager.getDefaultSensor(Sensor.TYPE_ACCELEROMETER);
        mSensorManager.registerListener(this, mAccelerometer, SensorManager.SENSOR_DELAY_NORMAL);
    }

    @Override
    public void onSensorChanged(SensorEvent event) {
        // alpha is calculated as t / (t + dT)
        // with t, the low-pass filter's time-constant
        // and dT, the event delivery rate

        final float alpha = 0.8f;

        gravity[0] = alpha * gravity[0] + (1 - alpha) * event.values[0];
        gravity[1] = alpha * gravity[1] + (1 - alpha) * event.values[1];
        gravity[2] = alpha * gravity[2] + (1 - alpha) * event.values[2];

        linear_acceleration[0] = event.values[0] - gravity[0];
        linear_acceleration[1] = event.values[1] - gravity[1];
        linear_acceleration[2] = event.values[2] - gravity[2];

        float scalarProduct = gravity[0] * linear_acceleration[0] +
                gravity[1] * linear_acceleration[1] +
                gravity[2] * linear_acceleration[2];
        float gravityVectorLength = (float) Math.sqrt(gravity[0] * gravity[0] +
                gravity[1] * gravity[1] + gravity[2] * gravity[2]);
        float lianearAccVectorLength = (float) Math.sqrt(linear_acceleration[0] * linear_acceleration[0] +
                linear_acceleration[1] * linear_acceleration[1] + linear_acceleration[2] * linear_acceleration[2]);

        float cosVectorAngle = scalarProduct / (gravityVectorLength * lianearAccVectorLength);

        TextView tv = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.tv);
        if (lianearAccVectorLength > 2) {//increase to detect only bigger accelerations, decrease to make detection more sensitive but noisy
            if (cosVectorAngle > 0.5) {
                tv.setText("Down");
            } else if (cosVectorAngle < -0.5) {
                tv.setText("Up");
            }
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void onAccuracyChanged(Sensor sensor, int i) {

    }
}