Land-vehicle Navigation Using GPS

Eric Abbott and David Powell


Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Stanford University

The Proceedings of the IEEE
January 1999, vol 87, no 1, pp 145-162

ABSTRACT

The Global Positioning System (GPS) has made navigation systems practical for a number of land-vehicle navigation applications. Today, GPS-based navigation systems can be found in motor vehicles, farming and mining equipment, and a variety of other land-based vehicles (e.g. golf carts and mobile robots). In Section II of this paper, each of these applications is discussed, and the reader is introduced to some of the issues involved with each one. Beginning in Section III, one particular technical aspect of navigation for land vehicles is discussed. Specifically, the research discussed in this paper presents a quantitative examination of the impact that individual navigation sensors have on the performance of a land-vehicle navigation system. A range of navigation sensor performance levels and their influence on vehicle positioning accuracy are examined. Results show that, for a typical navigation system, positioning error is dominated by the accuracy of the position fixes provided by the GPS receiver when GPS position fixes are available and by the rate gyro's bias drift when GPS position fixes are not available. Furthermore, results show that the accuracy of the GPS position fixes has a significant impact on the relative contributions that each dead-reckoning navigation sensor error makes. The implications of these results for navigation system design and sensor design are discussed.

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