Study on integrated micro inertial navigation system/GPS for land vehicles

With the rapid development of micro electron mechanical system, the performance of micro inertial sensors is being improved. Features of low cost and small volume of these sensors make them be applied widely in military and commercial fields. Because vehicle location and navigation system (VLNS) is the indispensable section in intelligent transportation system (ITS), study on micro inertial technique for VLNS is significant. In this paper a micro inertial navigation system (μ-INS) is designed using three single-axis microgyroscopes (EWTZ9G) and three microaccelerometers (ADXL150). The system has three modules, i.e., sensors module to measure angular rate and acceleration, data acquisition module to convert analog signal outputs of the sensors to digital signal, and data processing module to calculate necessary navigation information. Besides the loosely coupled Kalman filter, a simpler GPS-aided method is studied in the paper. Results of experiments show that integrated μ-INS/GPS meets the demand of location accuracy for VLNS in ITS.