Inertial navigation system for mobile land vehicles

This paper describes a prototype of an inertial navigation system for use in mobile land vehicles, such as cars or mobile robots. The complete system is composed by sensors, their mechanical mount and cabling, these connect to a PC card with local processing and memory, based on a Intel 80C196KC microcontroller. The sensors used were a piezoelectric vibrating gyroscope, two silicon accelerometers, two clinometers and also a magnetic flux-gate compass acting as an independent source for drift compensation. The working principle of the various sensors are presented. The experimental setup used for testing is based on a robot arm controlled in real-time to move the sensors along a known trajectory (velocity control)