Nowadays localization systems, which are based on GNSS (e.g. GPS), play a dominant role in the field of automated positioning and navigation. In the course of introduction of autonomous driving the performance requirements for integrated navigation systems are drastically increased.
Road vehicles are often exposed to environments with degraded satellite signal reception (tunnel, urban canyons, etc.). Then GNSS alone is not sufficient: Additional sensors need to be integrated in position and motion dynamics estimation, and for this purpose methods of sensor data fusion are applied.
For wide area navigation tasks the integration of GNSS and IMUs is the most important sensor combination. Research about respective fusion methods and architectures are a focus of research at PSGD.
GNSS/IMU based navigation will be augmented by further sensor types depending on specific applications, e.g. by use of wheel sensor data (odometry). For perception of the surroundings cameras, laser and radar systems are used.
