A New Real-Time Geolocation Tracking Tool Enhanced with Signal Filtering

Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite network which transmits encoded data and makes it possible to pinpoint the exact location on Earth by measuring the distance between satellites and the receiver. As the GPS satellites constantly emit radio signals, appropriately designed receivers are able to receive these signals. In this study, a tool is proposed in which an electronic circuit that integrates SIM908 shield and Arduino card works as a GPS receiver enhanced by signal filtering. The positional data obtained from GPS satellites yield error due to the noise in signals. Here, Kalman and averaging filters are applied and compared to reduce the overall positional error to improve results. Several experiments have been carried out to verify the performance of the filters with the GPS data. The results of the proposed enhanced system are compared with the initial configuration of the system. The results obtained are quite encouraging, demonstrating improvement in both clear and cloudy weather. Although the averaging filter shows higher performance at the beginning using up to four data points, Kalman filter shows higher error improvement rate when more temporal data points are included in the filtering operations.