Low-Cost Three-Dimensional Navigation Solution for RISS/GPS Integration Using Mixture Particle Filter

Recent technological advances in both GPS and low-cost microelectromechanical-system (MEMS)-based inertial sensors have enabled the monitoring of the location of moving platforms for numerous positioning and navigation (POS/NAV) applications. GPS is presently widely used in land vehicles. However, in some environments, the GPS signal may suffer from signal blockage and multipath effects that deteriorate the positioning accuracy. When miniaturized inside any moving platforms, the MEMS-based inertial navigation system (INS) can be integrated with GPS and enhance the performance in denied GPS environments (like in urban canyons). Targeting a low-cost navigation solution for land vehicles, this paper uses a reduced inertial sensor system (RISS) with MEMS-based inertial sensors. In this paper, the RISS consists of one single-axis gyroscope and a two-axis accelerometer used together with the vehicle's odometer, and the whole system is integrated with GPS to obtain a 3-D navigation solution. The traditional technique for this integration problem is Kalman filtering (KF). Due to the inherent errors of MEMS inertial sensors and the relatively high noise levels associated with their measurements, KF has limited capabilities in providing accurate positioning. Particle filtering (PF) was recently suggested as a nonlinear filtering technique to accommodate arbitrary inertial sensor characteristics, motion dynamics, and noise distributions. An enhanced version of PF is utilized in this paper and is called Mixture PF. The performance of the proposed 3-D navigation solution using Mixture PF for RISS/GPS integration is examined by road-test trajectories in a land vehicle. The proposed method is compared with four other solutions: 1) 3-D solution using KF for full INS/GPS integration; 2) 2-D solution using KF for RISS/GPS integration; 3) 2-D solution using Mixture PF for RISS/GPS integration; and 4) 3-D solution using sampling/importance resampling (SIR) PF for RISS/GPS integration. The experimental results show that the proposed solution outperforms all the compared counterparts.