Localization Experiments Based on Inertial Sensors for Navigation Applications

Abstract

Robust and accurate positioning systems with seamless outdoor and indoor coverage have been receiving a great deal of attention. In outdoor environments, as radio signals transmitted from base stations or satellites are jammed or shielded, to estimate an accurate location using only the absolute positioning scheme remains a difficult problem regarding location accuracy. In order to overcome the drawback of the ranging scheme based on the radio signals, this paper presents a positioning approach based on inertial-measurement-unit (IMU) observations to estimate the location of a mobile terminal (MT). For the location-estimation technique, the positioning experiment is handled by the dead-reckoning (DR) algorithm. By processing the observations from the IMU, it is possible to estimate the movement of an MT (car). In terms of the IMU-based approach, although the experimental results demonstrate that the positioning scheme using the DR algorithm causes the error propagation, the approach can work in short period of time for navigation applications.