A Novel Voronoi Based Particle Filter for Multi-Sensor Data Fusion

Abstract

Seamless and reliable navigation for civilian/military application is possible by fusing prominent Global Positioning System (GPS) with Inertial Navigation System (INS). This integrated GPS/INS unit exhibits a continuous navigation solution with increased accuracy and reduced uncertainty or ambiguity. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of dynamically creating a Voronoi based Particle Filter (VPF) for integrating INS and GPS data. This filter is based on redistribution of the proposal distribution such that the redistributed particles lie in high likelihood region; thereby increasing the filter accuracy. The usual limitations like degeneracy, sample impoverishment that are seen in conventional particle filter are overcome using our VPF with minimum feasible particles. The small particle size in our methodology reduces the computational load of the filter and makes real-time implementation feasible. Our field test results clearly indicate that the proposed VPF algorithm effectively compensated and reduced positional inaccuracies when GPS data is available. We also present the preliminary results for cases with short GPS outages that occur for low-cost inertial sensors.