Inertial Measurement Units-based probe vehicles: Path reconstruction and map matching

In the past decade, a growing amount of traffic data has been generated by mobile sensors, in the form of position sensors. Such sensors can include satellite-based positioning devices or devices that are reidentified at fixed locations, for example, toll tags or Bluetooth devices. In this article, we investigate a new type of traffic monitoring device based on an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), coupled with a fixed station on the ground (for example a Bluetooth reader). The problem of identifying the route traveled by the vehicle is written as an optimization problem involving features selected by the IMU and transmitted to the fixed station during the Bluetooth discovery process. The performance of the proposed scheme is validated using experimental data collected in Austin, TX.