Land-vehicle navigation using GPS

Abstract

The Global Positioning System (GPS) has made navigation systems practical for a number of land-vehicle navigation applications. Today, GPS-based navigation systems can be found in motor vehicles, farming and mining equipment, and a variety of other land-based vehicles (e.g., golf carts and mobile robots). In Section II of this paper, each of these applications is discussed, and the reader is introduced to some of the issues involved with each one. Beginning in Section III, one particular technical aspect of navigation for land vehicles is discussed. Specifically, the research discussed in this paper presents a quantitative examination of the impact that individual navigation sensors have on the performance of a land-vehicle navigation system. A range of navigation sensor performance levels and their influence on vehicle positioning accuracy are examined. Results show that, for a typical navigation system, positioning error is dominated by the accuracy of the position fixes provided by the GPS receiver when GPS position fixes are available and by the rate gyro's bias drift when GPS position fixes are not available. Furthermore, results show that the accuracy of the GPS position fixes has a significant impact on the relative contributions that each dead-reckoning navigation sensor error makes. The implications of these results for navigation system design and sensor design are discussed.

Advanced information processing of MEMS motion sensors for gesture interaction

“…Additionally, temperature variation is the most important factor for the bias drift. Nevertheless, the bias tends to change very slowly after the power is applied to gyroscopes (Abbott and Powell, 1999), and after thermal stabilization for a few minutes. Then, scale factor and bias error of gyroscope are assumed to be constant in Eq.…”

“…(9), K g and K a are the scale factor matrices, and they are the identity matrix I for the ideal case; b g and b a are the bias vectors, and they are null for the ideal case; v g and v a are assumed to be uncorrelated white Gaussian measurement noise with null mean and covariance matrices g = σ 2 g I and a = σ 2 a I. The bias and scale factor of gyroscopes are influenced by the environment such as the ambient temperature, while the temperature coefficients of accelerometers have a relatively lower quantitative relevance (Abbott and Powell, 1999). Furthermore, scale factor drifts of these sensors affect the accuracy of measurement less than the bias drifts (Foxlin, 2002).…”

Filtering Location-Based Information Using Visibility

“…For example, see [3] for a review of the capabilities and issues of vehicle GPS navigation systems, and [12,14] for example, location-based PDA guide systems. In-car systems often utilise a GPS system to give location information.…”

Intelligent Vehicular Transportation System (InVeTraS)

“…Sensors that aid this measurement are referred to as Dead-Reckoning sensors [13]. They include: o Accelerometer with tilt sensors: To measure forces resulting from turning, acceleration or braking [14].…”