Attitude-Estimation-Free GNSS and IMU Integration

A global navigation satellite system (GNSS) is a sensor that can acquire 3D position and velocity in an earth-fixed coordinate system and is widely used for outdoor position estimation of robots and vehicles. Various GNSS/inertial measurement unit (IMU) integration methods have been proposed to improve the accuracy and availability of GNSS positioning. However, all these methods require the addition of a 3D attitude to the estimated state to fuse the IMU data. In this letter, we propose a new optimization-based positioning method for combining GNSS and IMU that does not require attitude estimation. The proposed method uses two types of constraints: one is a constraint between states using only the magnitude of the 3D acceleration observed by an accelerometer, and the other is a constraint on the angle between the velocity vectors using the angular change measured by a gyroscope. The evaluation results with the simulation data show that the proposed method maintains the position estimation accuracy even when the IMU mounting position error increases and improves the accuracy when the GNSS observations contain multipath errors or missing data. The proposed method could improve positioning accuracy in experiments using IMUs acquired in real environments.