Evaluating the performance of MEMS based inertial navigation sensors for land mobile applications

In 2010 a collaborative working group was formed under the professional associations: International Association of Geodesy (IAG WG4.2.5) and International Federation of Surveys (FIG WG5.5). Entitled ubiquitous positioning, this working group aims to harness and develop existing research outputs available internationally in this research domain. Our goal over the next four years is to provide an online resource for academic and industry professionals, who can use these research outputs thereby reducing duplication and facilitating more rapid progress in the development of ubiquitous positioning systems. This paper presents a summary of the research activities and results of the working group to date. In particular, it presents the results of extensive testing to characterise the performance of a range of low-cost MEMS inertial sensors. The test scenarios, data acquisition software, processing tools and results obtained will be fully described and presented. The performance of these sensors in augmenting GNSS positioning is also presented using results obtained from a combination of loosely and tightly coupled Kalman filters. Finally, the future plans for the working group over the next four years and opportunities for wider collaboration will be discussed.