Development of an Inertial Navigation System for Determining the Pose of a Mobile Vehicle

Abstract:
An inertial navigation system provides the required information by either sensing the relative movement of mobile vehicle, or by determining where a vehicle is with respect to a reference position. The inertial navigation system presented in this work consists of a magnetic compass and distance sensor. The compass sensor provides directional information by measuring the earth magnetic field based on the hall-effect principle. The used analog compass has a range of ±0.6VDC and has been calibrated to have a resolution of 0.5deg /direction. The distance sensor is a combination of a hall-effect switch and a permanent magnet which gives the distance travelled referred to an initial position. The complete system is controlled by an Atmel ATmega169, 8-bit micro-controller, which provides the necessary computation resources and data display, 12 bit A/D converter, a well-regulated ±5VDC power supply and LCD display. Errors caused by bias, scale factors and non-linearities in the sensor readings which cause accumulations in navigation errors with time are considered.