Vision Sensor Aided Navigation for Ground Vehicle Applications
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Abstract
Manned or unmanned ground vehicles with autonomous ability have attracted people’s attention greatly in recent decades. As a result, there is an increased demand for the navigation performance improvement of low-cost navigation systems. The integration of INS and GNSS receivers is well-known and commonly used in ground vehicle applications, not only because the two sensors have complementary characteristics, but also their integration can provide position and orientation in a global scale. However, GNSS signals can suffer from obstruction and multi-path errors in city canyons, tunnels, woodlands, and mountainous regions. They are also vulnerable to jamming and spoofing. Therefore, the navigation in GNSS-denied environment is of interest among a lot of researchers. It is significant to study the methods to mitigate the error drift by using low-cost navigation sensors and aiding sensors, as well as the new integration schemes and techniques, especially using knowledge from multiple disciplines. The content of this thesis is as follows. 1. In the non-holonomic constraints (NHC) and odometer (OD) aided navigation system, the system model fully considers the inter-sensor calibration parameters, such as the boresight error and lever-arm of IMU with respect to the vehicle frame. Considering the characteristic of low-cost IMU sensors, the observability of INS/NHC/OD integration is theoretically analyzed, which is different from the existing high-end INS case. To deal with large boresight errors and to obtain higher inter-sensor calibration accuracy, we propose to use Unscented Kalman filter (UKF) as the fusion scheme, taking special treatment on the unscented transform to the quaternion. Simulation test shows that UKF outperforms EKF in estimating the calibration parameters, especially when the boresight error is slightly larger. A new attitude-velocity constraint aided INS is developed, which has the theoretical equivalence with NHC. The vehicle experiments demonstrate that with the help of this constraint, the positioning RMS error is within 0.7m during 60s GNSS outages for the IMU with