Pose estimation of unmanned ground vehicle based on dead-reckoning/GPS sensor fusion by unscented Kalman filter

Pose estimation is one of the most important part of guidance systems in unmanned vehicles. In this paper, we consider the problem of pose estimation of unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) equipped with a global positioning system (GPS), an odometer and an electronic compass. The unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is used to fuse the information from those sensors. To improve the accuracy and robustness, we also propose the method to calibrate the output of electronic compass. The experimental results strongly confirm the benefit of our simple algorithm even during GPS outage in some short period of time.