Algorithm Improvement of the Low-End GNSS/INS Systems for Land Vehicles Navigation

Recent advances in MEMS IMUs give the potential to develop affordable low-end GNSS/INS systems for land vehicles navigation (LVN). To improve the performance of low-end GNSS/INS systems, we made detailed quantitative analysis to the computation terms of the INS navigation equation in regard to accuracy impacts and computation loads and then proposed a simplified INS algorithm and adjusted the corresponding Kalman filter of GPS/INS integration. Comprehensive analysis was made to get the quantitative impacts of each simplified term. Results of road test have shown that the degradation of the navigation accuracy caused by the algorithm simplification was much less than that caused by the sensors errors of the MEMS IMU. Meanwhile, the computation load could be reduced by 70% with the simplified algorithm, and the reduction can go further to reach nearly 95% by downsampling IMU data rate simultaneously. Therefore, it is feasible to simplify the INS algorithm without losing accuracy and get benefits of reducing the computation load, which can further enhance the real-time performance of the navigation. The work has special significance for the applications that have limited processor resource and request strict real-time response, such as a deeply coupled GPS/INS receiver.