A Novel Probabilistic Approach for Vehicle Position Prediction in Free, Partial, and Full GPS Outages

In this paper, a novel framework is developed with the intention of continuously predicting vehicle position even in the challenging environments such as partial and full GPS outages. To achieve this, the Bayesian-Sparse Random Gaussian Prediction (B-SRGP) approach is proposed where the sparse random Gaussian matrix which obeys the restricted isometry property with high probability is adopted to handle the measurement model. During the full GPS outages, the proposed method fuses all available INS measurements to improve the vehicle position prediction whereas in free outages only the GPS data are processed. Besides, the Bayesian inference is used to specifically deal with the vehicle position prediction in partial GPS outages where data from both GPS and INS are taken as inputs. In all cases, measurement noises are assumed to be non-Gaussian distributed and follow the generalized error distribution. The performance of B-SRGP is evaluated with respect to real-world data collected using Smartphone-based vehicular sensing model. The proposed method is tested when measurement noises are both Gaussian and non-Gaussian distributed and also compared with the existing prediction methods. Experimental results confirm that B-SRGP presents higher accuracy prediction and lower mean-squared prediction error for vehicle position when measurement noises are non-Gaussian distributed.