Turin, Italy – The Embedded Systems Unit of Tierra S.p.A. created an algorithm to enhance GPS accuracy on low-cost, low-power and low computational power devices, in collaboration with the Department of Control and Computer Engineering and the Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning of Politecnico di Torino.
The project will be presented during the virtual International Conference of Electrical and Electronic Technologies for Automotive (AEIT)1, which will be held from 18 to 20 November 2020.
The main goal of this research is to get a more accurate position for low-cost devices. Improving the position accuracy is the key to provide a reliable anti-theft feature for every kind of asset, or to compensate excessive drift of position data on slow-moving vehicles.
The output of the collaboration is a set of low-computational power techniques, targeting low-cost IoT devices, to integrate GPS data and low-cost INS (inertial navigation sensor) measurements to improve the accuracy of the localization and tracking data. The methods address two main goals. First, the auto-calibration of low-cost INS, comprised of accelerometer and gyroscope, without the aid of external sensors. Second, the improvement of the quality of the position data, applying correction of GPS data to reduce the drifting in time.
The research shows that the methods proposed for the accuracy improvement of INS/GPS based localization systems require a very low computational effort, making them suitable for very low-budget, strapdown devices.
The dynamic INS calibration can be useful in applications for wearable IoT devices or for localization devices that are not fixed to the vehicle body. In all such cases, the proposed techniques are designed to have a minimal impact on the reduced computational pool in low-cost, low-power devices, leaving most of the resources free to execute other tasks.
“We developed and tested the algorithm on our telematic device WL11. Our goal is to integrate the abovementioned algorithm for all Tierra devices already this year. In the meanwhile, we are also testing a version of the algorithm that does not require the gyroscope data to get a more accurate position”.
Simone Moio – Embedded Systems Manager at Tierra S.p.A.
This project is one of the many ongoing collaborations between Tierra S.p.A. and Politecnico di Torino, with regard to their five-year partnership started in 2018.
1 info at: https://convegni.aeit.it/automotive/
