Robust Positioning for Road Information Services in Challenging Environments

Abstract

Next-generation Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) of future road traffic monitoring will be required to provide reports on traffic status, road conditions, and driver behaviour. Road surface anomalies contribute to increasing the risk of traffic accidents, reduced driver comfort and increased vehicles’ damage. The conventional integrated Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)/Inertial Navigation System (INS) positioning solutions can suffer from errors because of inertial sensor noises and biases, especially when low-cost and commercial grade inertial sensors are used. In this work, we use a reduced inertial sensor system utilizing Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System (MEMS) based inertial sensors, to integrate with the GNSS receiver and provide robust positioning in urban canyons. To provide acceptable performance in challenging urban environments, our method de-noises the MEMS-based inertial sensor measurements using a technique based on a Bi-orthonormal search, which separates the monitored motion dynamics from both the inertial sensor bias errors and high-frequency noises. As a result, the performance of the positioning system is improved, providing reliable positioning accuracy during extended GNSS outages that occur in various areas. To show the significant enhancement achieved by the proposed approach, we examined the system performance over three road test trajectories involving MEMS-based inertial sensors and GNSS receivers mounted on our test vehicle. The superior performance of our proposed INS/GNSS integrated positioning system is demonstrated in this paper during various GNSS outages, in different areas, and under multiple driving scenarios.