Experimental Results on an Integrated GPS and Multisensor System for Land Vehicle Positioning

Abstract

Global position system (GPS) is being widely used in land vehicles to provide positioning information. However, in urban canyons, rural tree canopies, and tunnels, the GPS satellite signal is usually blocked and there is an interruption in the positioning information. To obtain positioning solution during GPS outages, GPS can be augmented with an inertial navigation system (INS). However, the utilization of full inertial measurement unit (IMU) in land vehicles could be quite expensive despite the use of the microelectromechanical system (MEMS)-based sensors. Contemporary research is focused on reducing the number of inertial sensors inside an IMU. This paper explores a multisensor system (MSS) involving single-axis gyroscope and an odometer to provide full 2D positioning solution in denied GPS environments. Furthermore, a Kalman filter (KF) model is utilized to predict and compensate the position errors of the proposed MSS. The performance of the proposed method is examined by conducting several road tests trajectories using both MEMS and tactical grade inertial sensors. It was found that by using proposed MSS algorithm, the positional inaccuracies caused by GPS signal blockages are adequately compensated and resulting positional information can be used to steer the land vehicles during GPS outages with relatively small position errors.