Assessment of low-cost INS for positioning through sensor fusion with GPS

Abstract

Nowadays the most known and widespread application of GPS is the car navigation system. In order to use the GPS signal we need to be in open air, but what happens if we have to cross a tunnel, or an area where the signal cannot reach our receiver? This master thesis project analyses the reliability of a system born from the sensor fusion of GPS with a low-cost Inertial Navigation System. This kind of system is able to keep track of the motion of the vehicle and estimate the position in real time, in order to keep the synchronization with the GPS signal, when this will be available again. A regular GPS receiver and a low-cost INS are used; this last one contains three accelerometers and three gyroscopes. The project can be divided in three main sections: an experimental part with the acquisition of data, a data pre-processing and noise estimation part in which data are synchronized and the noise effects are corrected, and a last part with the simulations, which are done using a Kalman filter to combine the two sets of data in a weighted form.