GNSS-aided INS for land vehicle positioning and navigation

Abstract: This thesis begins with a survey of current state-of-the art in-car navigation systems. The pros and cons of the four commonly used information sources — GNSS/RF-based positioning, vehicle motion sensors, vehicle models and map information — are described. Common filters to combine the information from the various sources are discussed.Next, a GNSS-aided inertial navigation platform is presented, into which further sensors such as a camera and wheel-speed encoder can be incorporated. The construction of the hardware platform, together with an extended Kalman filter for a closed-loop integration between the GNSS receiver and the inertial navigation system (INS), is described. Results from a field test are presented.Thereafter, an approach is studied for calibrating a low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU), requiring no mechanical platform for the accelerometer calibration and only a simple rotating table for the gyro calibration. The performance of the calibration algorithm is compared with the Cramér-Rao bound for cases where a mechanical platform is used to rotate the IMU into different precisely controlled orientations.Finally, the effects of time synchronization errors in a GNSS-aided INS are studied in terms of the increased error covariance of the state vector. Expressions for evaluating the error covariance of the navigation state vector are derived. Two different cases are studied in some detail. The first considers a navigation system in which the timing error is not taken into account by the integration filter. This leads to a system with an increased error covariance and a bias in the estimated forward acceleration. In the second case, a parameterization of the timing error is included as part of the estimation problem in the data integration. The estimated timing error is fed back to control an adjustable fractional delay filter, synchronizing the IMU and GNSS-receiver data.