This article is part of the series Embedded Systems for Intelligent Vehicles.

Open Access Research Article

GPS/Low-Cost IMU/Onboard Vehicle Sensors Integrated Land Vehicle Positioning System

Jianchen Gao*, Mark G Petovello and M Elizabeth Cannon*

Author Affiliations

Position, Location, and Navigation (PLAN) Group, Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada

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EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems 2007, 2007:062616  doi:10.1155/2007/62616


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jes.eurasipjournals.com/content/2007/1/062616


Received: 14 October 2006
Accepted: 9 April 2007
Published: 6 June 2007

© 2007 Gao et al.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper aims to develop a GPS, low-cost IMU, and onboard vehicle sensors integrated land vehicle positioning system at low cost and with high (cm level) accuracy. Using a centralized Kalman filter, the integration strategies and algorithms are discussed. A mechanism is proposed for detecting and alleviating the violation of the lateral nonholonomic constraint on the wheel speed sensors that is widely used in previous research. With post-mission and real-time tests, the benefits gained from onboard vehicle sensors and the side slip detection and alleviation mechanism in terms of the horizontal positioning accuracy are analyzed. It is illustrated by all the tests that GPS plays a dominant role in determining the absolute positioning accuracy of the system when GPS is fully available. The integration of onboard vehicle sensors can improve the horizontal positioning accuracy during GPS outages. With respect to GPS and low-cost IMU integrated system, the percentage improvements from the wheel speed sensor are 90.4% for the open-sky test and 56.0% for suburban area real-time test. By integrating all sensors to detect and alleviate the violation of the lateral nonholonomic constraint, the percentage improvements over GPS and low-cost IMU integrated system can be enhanced to 92.6% for open-sky test and 65.1% for the real-time test in suburban area.

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