A Reliable Fusion Positioning Strategy for Land Vehicles in GPS-Denied Environments Based on Low-Cost Sensors

How to achieve reliable and accurate positioning performance using low-cost sensors is one of the main challenges for land vehicles. This paper proposes a novel fusion positioning strategy for land vehicles in GPS-denied environments, which enhances the positioning performance simultaneously from the sensor and methodology levels. It integrates multiple complementary low-cost sensors not only incorporating GPS and microelectromechanical-based inertial measurement unit, but also a “virtual” sensor, i.e., a sliding-mode observer (SMO). The SMO is first synthesized based on nonlinear vehicle dynamics model to estimate vehicle state information robustly. Then, a federated Kalman filter (FKF) is designed to fuse all sensor information, which can easily isolate and accommodate such sensor failures as GPS ones due to its decentralized filtering architecture. Further, a hybrid global estimator (HGE) is constructed by augmenting the FKF with a grey predictor, which has the advantages of dealing with the systems with uncertain or insufficient information. The HGE works in the update mode when there is no GPS failure, whereas it switches to the prediction mode in case of GPS outage to realize accurate and reliable positioning. The experimental results validate the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed strategy.