Land vehicle positioning using GPS and dead reckoning

To ensure reliable land vehicle positioning, the Global Positioning System (GPS) is one of the best techniques commonly used in present-day positioning systems. However, GPS signals are not available if line of sight with the satellites is lost. In this respect, the addition of the Dead Reckoning (DR) method to complement the GPS unit would enhance the reliability of land vehicle positioning system. For implementing the DR method, the magnetic sensor and accelerometer are used for obtaining heading and velocity or distance information. Calibration of two sensors' dynamic model and DR algorithm are also introduced in this paper. The test result utilizing the GPS and DR methods is analyzed in this paper. It utilize spositioning information from GPS receiver when GPSsignal is available, otherwise DR is started to compensate GPS outage with the GPS output as the original point. The results showed that the error in east and north produced by the DR algorithm for a short time interval can be limitedwithin an acceptable range.