Feasibility Study of a Partial Gyro-Free Inertial Navigation System Mounted on a Ground Robot

Abstract

Gyro-free Inertial Navigation System (GFINS) uses only linear accelerometers in order to determine the linear and angular acceleration vectors. However, for ground robot applications, such a system is redundant and adds unnecessary errors of irrelevant accelerometers. To circumvent this, a partial GFINS configuration is proposed. In the partial configuration only accelerations relevant for two-dimensional ground navigation are employed. A demonstration of the advantages of a partial system compared to the redundant system is provided. The comparison is made using quality factor calculations, simulation and field experiments.