EKF Based Outdoor Positioning System using Multiple GPS Receivers

Abstract

In this paper, a high precision outdoor positioning system is newly proposed using multiple GPS receivers based on the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Typically, the GPS signal has the instantaneous errors that degrade the positioning seriously. Using the multiple GPS receivers instead of an expensive DGPS receiver, the positioning reliability and accuracy are improved in this research as a low cost solution. To incorporate the small displacement, an INS data have been tightly coupled to the GPS data, which has the inherit disadvantage of the cumulative error occurring over time. To achieve a stabilized and accurate positioning system, the multiple GPS receiver data are fused with the INS data through the EKF process. Through real navigation experiments of an outdoor mobile robot, the performance of the proposed system has been verified to be accurate comparable to DGPS system with a lower cost.