Attitude Heading Reference System based vehicle stationary state detection

Vehicle navigation is a crucial requirement for many applications. Global Positioning System (GPS) can provide accurate navigation information. But the GPS performance degrades and even a complete outage may occur in urban areas due to line of sight problem. Inertial Navigation System (INS) can provide navigation information during a GPS outage. However, due to bias, drift, noise and other errors, the position information quickly diverges which is more sever for low cost INS. These errors can be corrected in a stationary state. Detecting the stationary state to correct the INS error is crucial for navigation system. This paper proposes a novel stationary detection technique by the threshold approach with an Attitude Heading Reference System (AHRS) built from the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors and acceleration information. The stationary state is detected from variance of the acceleration data and the heading of the vehicle. The test result shows that the 87% correct stationary state is detected from both the acceleration and heading information. The stationary state detection can help to correct the INS errors.