Low-Cost Post-Mission Positioning and Orientation Solution for Land-Based Mobile Mapping Using Nonlinear Filtering

J. Georgy, A. Noureldin

Abstract:	Mobile Mapping is a problem that requires accurate positioning and precise trajectory determination. Contrary to navigation which requires a real time solution, the position and orientation of the mobile platform with the imaging device can be achieved in post-mission processing to achieve the best possible positioning accuracy. The most common positioning techniques used in mapping systems are based on integrating inertial navigation systems (INS) with satellite positioning such as Global Positioning System (GPS). Normally, a highend inertial measurement unit (IMU) with fiber optic gyroscope (FOG) or ring laser gyroscope (RLG) is used to obtain the highest accuracies for prolonged time periods. Such IMUs make the positioning system very costly. Micro-electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) based IMUs are low-cost, small size, and low power consuming but they exhibit high noise and drift characteristics which make them inadequate for mapping applications especially in degraded GPS environments. Additionally, these sensors have complex error characteristics which are difficult to model and hence these sensors cannot be used for any application requiring high positioning accuracies. This paper proposes a post-mission positioning solution for land vehicle based mapping system using low-cost MEMS inertial sensors, the vehicle's odometer and GPS. To enable MEMS inertial sensors for mobile mapping different enhancements are proposed in this work. A nonlinear filtering technique based on particle filtering (PF) together with sophisticated models for inertial sensor stochastic drifts are used to integrate GPS with threedimensional (3D) reduced inertial sensor system (RISS) (which has better performance for land vehicles than traditional full-IMU solutions). The Mixture PF 3D RISS/GPS integration already provides a high performance forward solution for MEMS-based sensors as compared to any traditional integration method. Exploiting the fact that mapping problem accepts post- processing, nonlinear backward smoothing is used to further enhance the solution. The effectiveness of the proposed positioning system is verified by different real-life road tests some of which were conducted in harsh downtown environments. The results examine the suitability and performance of the proposed solution for open sky and downtown environments with degraded/multipath or denied GPS for long time durations exceeding 5 minutes of continuous degradation or blockage.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 23rd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2010) September 21 - 24, 2010 Oregon Convention Center, Portland, Oregon Portland, OR
Pages:	991 - 1003
Cite this article:	Georgy, J., Noureldin, A., "Low-Cost Post-Mission Positioning and Orientation Solution for Land-Based Mobile Mapping Using Nonlinear Filtering," Proceedings of the 23rd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2010), Portland, OR, September 2010, pp. 991-1003.
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