Vehicle Heading Estimation Using a Two Low-Cost GPS Receiver Configuration

Abstract

The use of navigation systems, such as those based today on the Global Positioning System (GPS), in standard vehicles has become affordable and has been generalized, in the recent years. Combining the knowledge of our position with our heading can bring an added value to many applications, as has been seen in many smartphones that nowadays come equipped with a GPS and a magnetic compass. This paper presents an algorithm for a digital compass, with heading estimation based on positioning data retrieved from two low-cost single frequency GPS receivers. The algorithm is based on an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) that was developed for heading estimation.The performance of the proposed algorithm was evaluated using real data from two low-cost receivers installed in a standard car. Several field trials were conducted and three motion scenarios were analyzed: straight path, curved path and immobilization.

Instant Segmentation and Fitting of Excavations in Subsurface Utility Engineering

“…We previously implemented a continuous drift correction that utilizes RTK-GPS as ground truth to re-initialize the reference coordinate system whenever the local tracking drifts too far. Furthermore, we developed a GPS-based north estimation algorithm, derived from frequently used approaches in robotics [5,57,65] using two antennae. North angles are continuously calculated inside UTM coordinate space between two positions in the virtual tracking space and the GPS space.…”

Magnetic Sensors for Navigation Applications: An Overview

“…However this is not the case for pedestrian and indoor navigation, in which low-cost systems are usually the first option. For example, a low-cost GPS receiver cannot provide precise orientation results (Trigo et al, 2011), and a low-cost INS suffers from drift. As a result, it is still a challenge for the low-cost integrated systems to identify and eliminate environmental magnetic deviations.…”