A Comparison of Three Measurement Models for the Wheel-mounted MEMS IMU-based Dead Reckoning System

A self-contained autonomous navigation system is desired to complement the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) for land vehicles, for which odometer aided inertial navigation system (ODO/INS) is a classical solution. In this study, we use a wheel-mounted MEMS IMU (Wheel-IMU) to substitute the conventional odometer, and further, investigate three types of measurement models, including the velocity measurement, displacement increment measurement, and contact point zero-velocity measurement, in the Wheel-IMU based dead reckoning (DR) system. The three measurements, along with the non-holonomic constraints (NHCs) are fused with INS by an extended Kalman filter (EKF). Theoretical discussion and field tests illustrate their feasibility and equivalence in overall positioning performance, which have the maximum horizontal position drifts less than 2% of the total travelled distance. However, the displacement increment measurement model is less sensitive to the installation lever arm between the Wheel-IMU and wheel center.