Sensor Fusion for Centimeter Location in GPS-Denied Areas
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is unreliable or unavailable in many areas, such as indoors or dense urban environments, making it difficult to accurately locate objects like vehicles and pedestrians.
Innovation Solution
A system of sensor units with overlapping fields of view, each equipped with different types of sensors (e.g., cameras, lidar, radar), that fuse data to provide accurate location information down to a few centimeters, using sensor fusion algorithms and processing to identify and track objects in GPS-denied areas.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If GPS service is used for location identification, then location information can be obtained in open areas, but GPS coverage is unavailable or unreliable in confined areas such as indoors or dense urban environments
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces sensor units with multiple sensors (cameras, LIDAR, radar, IMU) as intermediary components to bridge the gap where GPS fails. These sensor units deploy alternative sensing mechanisms that operate independently of satellite signals, enabling location identification in GPS-denied environments through multi-sensor data fusion and environmental feature matching.
2Measurement precision
If multiple sensor units with overlapping fields of view are deployed, then location accuracy improves to centimeter-level precision, but device complexity and system configuration increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple sensor units with overlapping fields of view into a coordinated network. By combining data from multiple sensors (camera, LIDAR, radar, IMU) across multiple units and fusing this data through algorithms, the system achieves centimeter-level location accuracy while managing the complexity through integrated multi-sensor processing.
3Measurement precision
If sensor fusion algorithms are used to process data from multiple sensors, then location identification accuracy improves in GPS-denied areas, but computational requirements and processing complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the computational workload by distributing processing across multiple sensor units, each performing local sensor fusion on their own data. This distributed segmentation reduces the computational burden on any single processor while achieving accurate location identification through coordinated processing of fused data from multiple units.
Data Source
AI summary
An apparatus for providing location information includes a plurality of sensor units which are distributed throughout a confined area lacking a global positioning system (GPS) coverage and have respectively a plurality of FOVs that at least partially overlap with each other in an overlap area, each of the plurality of sensor units including a first sensor and a second sensor of a type that is different from a type of the first sensor; and a processor. The processor is configured to fuse sensing data provided by the first sensor and the second sensor that are respectively included in each of the plurality of sensor units, identify a location of an object existing in the overlap area based on the fused sensing data, and provide location information of the identified location to the object.