An Economical and Effective Multi-sensor Integration for Portable Navigation System

X. Zhao, Z. Syed, D.B. Wright, N. El-Sheimy

Abstract:	Currently, Global Positioning System (GPS) is widely used for most navigation applications. However, GPS quality and availability suffers greatly in certain environments, such as downtown, urban canyons or indoors due to signal blockages. To help bridge these signal gaps, a portable navigation system integrated with GPS and multiple low-cost MEMS sensors is investigated. Several dead reckoning algorithms based on accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers for pedestrian navigation are explored. The sensors data are integrated with GPS using Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) but as the EKF cannot be generalized for common modes of transit, the paper provides details of the selection of estimated states, sensor models, system model and measurements for the most robust solution. In the end, field tests are performed to verify the developed algorithms using a prototype portable navigation system. The test trajectories include outdoor and indoor pedestrian navigation scenarios. The results show that the prototype system can effectively deal with short GPS signal outages and correctly estimate navigation states online using EKF. Furthermore, sensors configurations can be simplified to reduce system cost. The solutions exhibit good potential for a portable, reliable, accurate and low-cost system that enables continuous navigation anywhere.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 22nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2009) September 22 - 25, 2009 Savannah International Convention Center Savannah, GA
Pages:	2088 - 2095
Cite this article:	Zhao, X., Syed, Z., Wright, D.B., El-Sheimy, N., "An Economical and Effective Multi-sensor Integration for Portable Navigation System," Proceedings of the 22nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2009), Savannah, GA, September 2009, pp. 2088-2095.
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