Vehicle localization in outdoor woodland environments with sensor fault detection

This paper describes a 2D localization method for a differential drive mobile vehicle on real forested paths. The mobile vehicle is equipped with two rotary encoders, Crossbow’s NAV420CA Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and a NAVCOM SF-2050M GPS receiver (used in StarFire-DGPS dual mode). Loosely-coupled multisensor fusion and sensor fault detection issues are discussed as well. An extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is used for sensor fusion estimation where a GPS noise pre-filter is used to avoid introducing biased GPS data (affected by multi-path). Normalized Innovation Squared (NIS) tests are performed when a GPS measurement is incorporated to reject GPS data outliers and keep the consistency of the filter. Finally, experimental results show the performance of the localization system compared to a previously measured ground truth.