An intelligent navigator for seamless INS/GPS integrated land vehicle navigation applications

The Kalman filter (KF) has been implemented as the primary integration scheme of the global positioning system (GPS) and inertial navigation systems (INS) for many land vehicle navigation and positioning applications. However, it has been reported that KF-based techniques have certain limitations, which reflect on the position error accumulation during GPS signal outages. Therefore, this article exploits the idea of incorporating artificial neural networks to develop an alternative INS/GPS integration scheme, the intelligent navigator, for next generation land vehicle navigation and positioning applications. Real land vehicle test results demonstrated the capability of using stored navigation knowledge to provide real-time reliable positioning information for stand-alone INS-based navigation for up to 20 min with errors less than 16 m (as compared to 2.6 km in the case of the KF). For relatively short GPS outages, the KF was superior to the intelligent navigator for up to 30 s outages. In contrast, the intelligent navigator was superior to the KF when the length of GPS outages was extended to 90 s. The average improvement of the intelligent navigator reached 60% in the latter scenario. The results presented in this article strongly indicate the potential of including the intelligent navigator as the core algorithm for INS/GPS integrated land vehicle navigation systems.