Integration of GNSS-receivers with dual foot-mounted INS in urban and indoor environments

Abstract

In safety-critical applications, including firefighter and law enforcement operations, infrastructure-free localization systems are typically required. These systems must provide accurate localization in all scenarios. Seamless indoor and outdoor localization and navigation, including in dense urban environments, are needed. Multi-sensor fusion algorithms constitute an integral part in all state-of-the-art indoor positioning systems. GNSS-receivers typically provide poor estimates of their own position uncertainty in dense urban and indoor environments, where significant position errors can be expected, which makes the design of a robust sensor fusion algorithm a challenge. Sensor fusion strategies for integration of a GNSS-receiver with foot-mounted inertial navigation systems (INS) are described and evaluated in this work. For a loosely coupled integration strategy, we suggest to use a cut-off criteria that governs when to discard the GNSS-positions and demonstrate that it can improve the position and heading accuracy in outdoor/indoor transition regions. Similarly, for a tightly coupled integration strategy, we suggest an approach with heavy-tailed measurement noise and demonstrate its capability to suppress inconsistent data and improve performance in the same regions.