An Experimental System for Tightly Coupled Integration of GPS and AC Magnetic Positioning

Abstract

This paper describes the design and realization of a magnetic positioning system (MPS) integrated with a global positioning system (GPS) receiver. The GPS receiver is composed of hardware and software sections that can be integrated with the MPS. Both system-level architecture and realization details are described along with experimental results. The realized prototype measurement system exhibits a maximum positioning error of less than 5 m and an average error of less than 3 m, thus providing better performance than a stand-alone GPS consumer receiver. Further, the system is tested in two different scenarios, showing repeatable performance. A practical system implementation is presented, which can be employed in applications that require power-efficiency and low-cost operation. Such an implementation is tested experimentally, providing results that are comparable to those of the preliminary prototype, thus validating the proposed approach.