THE DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF A NAVIGATION GRADE EGI SYSTEM FOR LAND VEHICULAR NAVIGATION APPLICATIONS

Abstract

In recent years, most people use commercial integrated navigation systems to develop navigation algorithms. However, due to the different levels of sensors on the market, it is difficult to customize commercial systems and leads to limited development of navigation algorithms. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to develop a real-time integrated navigation system EGI-1000 (Embedded GNSS and INS) including software and hardware, and effectively reduce the cost with the commercial price. The real-time integrated navigation system EGI-1000 contains a navigation-grade IMU, IMU1000 and NovAtel OEM 7720 GNSS receiver module. In this research, the integration process can be divided into three parts. The first part is the integration of hardware, and the architecture diagram of the real-time integrated navigation system will be displayed. The second part is the pre-processing of data. In the multi-sensor time synchronization problem, this research will propose a method about cross-correlation to validate whether the timestamp of IMU data is delay. The last part is algorithm about fusing data from multiple sensors and motion constraints. Extended Kaman Filter (EKF) will be the core and motion constraints including Zero Velocity Update (ZUPT) and Non-Holonomic Constraints (NHC) are integrated in the Loosely Coupled (LC) scheme. The calibration of Inertial navigation Measurement Unit (IMU) will also be conducted to determine the parameter in algorithm. The results of the experiments will be shown in this paper. Both of hardware and navigation algorithm in the integrated navigation system of this research are used to conduct multiple experiment including open sky environments, GNSS challenging environments, and GNSS denied environment. In comparison with the reference data, the navigation accuracy of the developed integrated navigation system can achieve centimeter-level accuracy (“Active Control” level and “Where in lane” level) in open sky and GNSS challenging environments. According to the propagation error theory, the result in GNSS denied environment also meet the expected value. The navigation algorithm is also feasible for the commercial integrated navigation system.