GPS-free terrain-based vehicle tracking performance as a function of inertial sensor characteristics

Prior experiments have confirmed that specific terrain-based localization algorithms, designed to work in GPS-free or degraded-GPS environments, achieve vehicle tracking with tactical-grade inertial sensors. However, the vehicle tracking performance of these algorithms using low-cost inertial sensors with inferior specifications has not been verified. The included work identifies, through simulations, the effect of inertial sensor characteristics on vehicle tracking accuracy when using a specific terrain-based tracking algorithm based on Unscented Kalman Filters. Results indicate that vehicle tracking is achievable even when low-cost inertial sensors with inferior specifications are used. However, the precision of vehicle tracking decreases approximately linearly as bias instability and angle random walk coefficients increase. The results also indicate that as sensor cost increases, the variance in vehicle tracking error asymptotically tends to zero. Put simply, as desired precision increases, increasingly larger and quantifiable investment is required to attain an improvement in vehicle tracking precision.