GPS/BDS/INS tightly coupled integration accuracy improvement using an improved adaptive interacting multiple model with classified measurement update

Abstract An Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is commonly used to fuse raw Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) measurements and Inertial Navigation System (INS) derived measurements. However, the Conventional EKF (CEKF) suffers the problem for which the uncertainty of the statistical properties to dynamic and measurement models will degrade the performance. In this research, an Adaptive Interacting Multiple Model (AIMM) filter is developed to enhance performance. The soft-switching property of Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) algorithm allows the adaptation between two levels of process noise, namely lower and upper bounds of the process noise. In particular, the Sage adaptive filtering is applied to adapt the measurement covariance on line. In addition, a classified measurement update strategy is utilized, which updates the pseudorange and Doppler observations sequentially. A field experiment was conducted to validate the proposed algorithm, the pseudorange and Doppler observations from Global Positioning System (GPS) and BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) were post-processed in differential mode. The results indicate that decimeter-level positioning accuracy is achievable with AIMM for GPS/INS and GPS/BDS/INS configurations, and the position accuracy is improved by 35.8%, 34.3% and 33.9% for north, east and height components, respectively, compared to the CEKF counterpart for GPS/BDS/INS. Degraded performance for BDS/INS is obtained due to the lower precision of BDS pseudorange observations.