A Comparison of Three Measurement Models for the Wheel-Mounted MEMS IMU-Based Dead Reckoning System

A self-contained autonomous dead reckoning (DR) system is desired to complement the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) for land vehicles, for which the odometer-aided inertial navigation system (ODO/INS) is a classical solution. In this study, we use a wheel-mounted MEMS IMU (Wheel-IMU) to substitute the odometer, and further, investigate three types of measurement models, including the velocity measurement, displacement increment measurement, and contact point zero-velocity measurement, in the Wheel-IMU based DR system. The measurement produced by the Wheel-IMU along with the non-holonomic constraint (NHC) are fused with INS through an error-state extended Kalman filter (EKF). Theoretical discussion and field tests illustrate the feasibility and equivalence of the three measurements in terms of the overall DR performance. The maximum horizontal position drifts are all less than 2% of the total travelled distance. Additionally, the displacement increment measurement model is less sensitive to the lever arm error between the Wheel-IMU and the wheel center.

I. Introduction

The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) has been commonly used for vehicular navigation since its very birth. Although it can provide accurate positioning service in line of sight conditions [1], the stability and reliability deteriorate in complicated environments such as urban canyons and forests owing to the multipath and signal blockage [2], [3]. Therefore, other relative positioning systems are required to complement the GNSS to maintain the accuracy during GNSS outages.