An enhanced integrity multisensor Fusion for a reliable seamless navigation

Resumen

Since its first applications in the late 20th century, GNSS technology has been deployed by the world’s technologically advanced countries in multiple fields, from fleet monitoring to sport-related topics. This massive deployment has led to new use cases that may not have been expected during the definition of said technology. Different error sources, such as interferences, jamming, signal attenuation due to indoor or urban canyon navigation, and signal-blocking objects may degrade the performance of GNSS-based navigation. Thus, standalone GNSS systems may not fulfil all the requirements a certain scenario might ask for. This has resulted in the research of alternative or supplementary methods to solve the aforementioned issues, such as multisensor navigation. This has become one of the main alternatives to GNSS standalone navigation, as it has been shown in the literature that it can result in an improvement in navigation in terms of availability or continuity, for example. Human-life involvement and high-cost freight transportation, among other factors, have attracted the attention of the users to the definition of a measure of trust that is placed in the correctness of the information supplied by the navigation systems; also called integrity. This concept is employed, among others, to enable the system to detect if it is trustable for navigation, provide warnings, and even act consequently. In this dissertation, we analyze, first, the design of an online multisensory navigation algorithm as a solution to the issues GNSS suffers especially in urban and indoor environments. Moreover, a two-stage integrity-ensuring method is analyzed, being this second algorithm a tailored complementary feature of the proposed navigation one.