🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the challenges of abrupt outliers, bias drift, and high computational load encountered when deploying large-scale, low-cost MEMS inertial sensor arrays for land navigation. To this end, the authors propose a robust extended Kalman filter (EKF) architecture, termed RISAF, which incorporates dynamic percentile gating and real-time bias tracking prior to the EKF prediction step. This approach effectively suppresses anomalous measurements and compensates for individual sensor drift without expanding the state dimensionality, enabling efficient fusion of data from hundreds of IMUs. Experimental results demonstrate that, in GNSS-denied environments, RISAF significantly improves heading accuracy and mitigates drift accumulation compared to simple averaging, achieving navigation performance approaching that of tactical-grade inertial systems.
📝 Abstract
We propose a robust Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) architecture for land navigation using an array of hundreds of low-cost micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) inertial sensors. The main challenges in this setting are bursty sensor-specific bias errors, bias drift, and the need to aggregate many inertial measurements without increasing the computational burden of the navigation filter. To address these challenges, we introduce Robust Inertial Sensor Array Fusion (RISAF), a pre-filtering framework that combines dynamic percentile gating with real-time bias tracking before the EKF prediction step. The proposed aggregation suppresses anomalous sensor readings and compensates for individual sensor drift while preserving the vehicle-level kinematic signal. Because the resulting fused inertial measurements are passed to a standard EKF, the navigation filter retains a minimal state vector and supports real-time execution. We evaluate RISAF through extensive simulations and real-world field tests in GNSS-denied environments, with the data provided as supplementary material. Compared with a baseline that averages the sensor readings, RISAF achieves substantially improved azimuth accuracy and reduced drift accumulation. These results demonstrate that robust fusion of large MEMS inertial arrays can bridge a substantial part of the gap between cost-effective hardware and tactical-grade inertial navigation performance.