A Technology-agnostic GNSS/INS Real-time Sensor Fusion Platform with Ultra Wide Band Cooperative Distance Measurements for Terrestrial Vehicle Navigation

Javier Arribas, Monica Navarro, Ana Moragrega, David Calero, Enric Fernández, Jordi Vilà-Valls, Carles Fernández-Prades

Abstract: This paper presents an enhancement of the well-known GNSS/INS sensor fusion approach by supporting cooperative distance measurements to improve its positioning performance for terrestrial vehicle navigation. The areas of improvement are those where the GNSS signals are severely degraded and the low-cost INS system can not provide reliable dead reckoning position estimations. In the proposed cooperative positioning scheme, additional information is acquired from other infrastructure or communication network, such as adhoc sensor network with several intercommunicated vehicles or nodes. The additional information provided mainly by distance measurements between nodes and from nodes to other elements of the network (e.g. anchor nodes placed on fixed equipment such as traffic lights) can be used as independent measurements reporting new information to the Bayesian filter. The implementation has been tested in a representative field test by deploying a network of commercial off-the-shelf Ultra Wide Band (UWB) anchor nodes, which can provide down to centimeter distance measurement accuracy. Results show an improvement of the positioning performance in challenging scenarios where the original GNSS/INS fusion did not meet ITS positioning requirements due to the GNSS signal impairments and the lack of stability of low-cost IMUs.
Published in: Proceedings of the 31st International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2018)
September 24 - 28, 2018
Hyatt Regency Miami
Miami, Florida
Pages: 1967 - 1984
Cite this article: Arribas, Javier, Navarro, Monica, Moragrega, Ana, Calero, David, Fernández, Enric, Vilà-Valls, Jordi, Fernández-Prades, Carles, "A Technology-agnostic GNSS/INS Real-time Sensor Fusion Platform with Ultra Wide Band Cooperative Distance Measurements for Terrestrial Vehicle Navigation," Proceedings of the 31st International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2018), Miami, Florida, September 2018, pp. 1967-1984. https://doi.org/10.33012/2018.16014
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