A low cost INS/GPS solution comparison for automotive mass market applications

This paper explores the possibilities of integrating a low cost Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) with a commercial-grade GNSS receiver for mass-market applications such as common vehicular driving assistance. The performance of such integration are investigated for two integration schemes: the loosely-coupled and tightly-coupled integration. The two different aiding strategies are used to combine a consumer IMU with a Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) receiver, providing a low-cost integration solution. This paper shows as integrations that exploits a low cost IMU can be sufficient to highlight differences between loose and tight approaches using real data. The procedure to obtain valuable comparing outputs is described through the implementation of the analyzed INS/GNSS integrations and by an useful method to characterize the IMU error statistic. The test-enabling platform employed for this investigation is constituted by the SAT-SURF & SAT-SURFER, an HW/SW development kit that can help the realization of low-cost complex architectures and dramatically speed-up the execution of significant test campaigns, by easily resolving problems such as data synchronization, time stamping, data storage for post processing analysis.