Improving Accuracy of the Vehicle Attitude Estimation for Low-Cost INS/GPS Integration Aided by the GPS-Measured Course Angle

This paper presents a method using the Global Positioning System (GPS)-measured course angle to improve the accuracy of the vehicle attitude estimation for low-cost inertial navigation system/GPS (INS/GPS) integration. Observability properties of the error states in the low-cost integration navigation system are first analyzed, indicating that the attitude estimation is severely affected by vehicle maneuvers, particularly the yaw angle. The pitch and roll angles are strongly observed; hence, the observability of these two angles is nearly free of influence caused by vehicle maneuvers, and these two angles can be accurately estimated. To improve the yaw-angle estimation, we propose a cascaded Kalman filter to deal with the yaw angle separately with the aid of the GPS-measured course angle. Additionally, two switching rules are established to remove the influence caused by the sideslip angle and GPS noise. The experimental results validate the observability analysis of the low-cost INS/GPS system and show that the proposed attitude estimation method can effectively improve the accuracy of the vehicle attitude estimation, suggesting that this technique is a viable candidate for many control applications used in cars.