Abstract:
Low cost MEMS inertial sensors are being widely manufactured and used in
numerous applications ranging from defense, aerospace industry, agriculture,
image stabilization, precision drilling, safety air bags in cars, mining, gaming,
safety and many more. MEMS inertial sensors based low cost INS take the ad vantage of low price but performance achieved from such sensors is poor. GPS
integration with such MEMS sensors improves their accuracy significantly. Such
GPS aided MEMS inertial navigation systems are used in many safety applica tions such as road safety and monitoring. GPS and INS systems are usually
integrated using a loosely coupled integration scheme, which is easy to imple ment. In case of GPS outage even for few tens of seconds the error grows very
quickly. Such situation can arise in big cities with tall buildings, temporarily
blocking GPS signals. Challenge, in such situations where GPS outage severely
affects the performance, is to develop some sort of mechanism which minimizes
quick error growth.
This thesis investigates the performance of low cost MEMS based INS integrated
with GPS in loosely coupled manner. LKF, EKF and UKF schemes are used
in this work. MATLAB simulations are performed and scripts for LKF, EKF
and UKF are developed. Further, a prediction method(PM) is proposed which
improves the performance of INS/GPS during GPS Outage by minimizing the
quick error growth.
