Observability Analysis of Non-Holonomic Constraints for Land-Vehicle Navigation Systems

You Li, Xiaoji Niu, Quan Zhang, Yahao Cheng, Chuang Shi

Abstract:	The Land-Vehicle Navigation (LVN) market has grown rapidly during these decades. Especially, the integration of a MEMS-based (Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems) Inertial Measuring Unit (IMU) with a GNSS receiver-chip become commonly used navigation techniques by virtue of their advantages such as small sized, light weight, with low power consumption, and have extremely low cost. To provide accurate and reliable positioning with a low-cost GNSS/MEMS INS system, it is valuable to introduce specific auxiliary information that can improve the navigation performance and is independent of extra hardware costs. The auxiliary information is especially useful during GNSS outage periods or when the vehicle is moving with low dynamics (e.g. no change of attitude and accelerations) which lead to the poor observability of the GNSS/INS navigation system. For LVN applications, Non-Holonomic Constraints (NHC) is one of the most common types of auxiliary information. This paper focuses on study the contributions of NHC from the perspective of observability, which provides a deeper insight and show how the NHC works in the navigation algorithms. Combining with several typical vehicle dynamics, it is also clear to see the effects of NHC under different situations. Both theoretical analysis and simulation tests have shown that the contributions of NHC on a certain state depend on both the current vehicle dynamic as well as the relative magnitude between this state and the states coupled with it under the current vehicle dynamic; both the accelerating and turning motions are beneficial to fulfill the contributions of NHC on the estimates of both the yaw and the pitch, and this contribution will be stronger with higher vehicle speed; NHC has significant effects on controlling the roll. Also, the effects of NHC on the estimates of the biases of both gyroscopes and accelerometers are analyzed in this paper. The outcomes of this paper show that it is beneficial to promote the better utilization of NHC or other priori information in low-cost navigation systems.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 25th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2012) September 17 - 21, 2012 Nashville Convention Center, Nashville, Tennessee Nashville, TN
Pages:	1521 - 1529
Cite this article:	Li, You, Niu, Xiaoji, Zhang, Quan, Cheng, Yahao, Shi, Chuang, "Observability Analysis of Non-Holonomic Constraints for Land-Vehicle Navigation Systems," Proceedings of the 25th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2012), Nashville, TN, September 2012, pp. 1521-1529.
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