Outdoor Applications of precise positioning are many-fold and include pedestrian navigation with smartphones, driving and navigation of cars, ships and railways, precise mapping, surveying and object detection. All safety-critical applications such as the automated or even autonomous driving of vehicles require both accurate and extremely reliable position information with cost-efficient sensors. Indoor Applications in industrial or civilian settings (e.g. hospitals, warehouses) are focused on tracking persons involved in critical activities, especially those with risks to health and safety aspects. Having a robust solution to accurately obtain the position of mobile assets in a workshop area with moving AGV (Autonomous Guided Vehicles) will be useful for improving safety, efficiency and gathering real time updates on its area of operations.
MSFUSION aims to develop sensor data fusion techniques based on GNSS and INS systems complemented by a wide array of complementary sensor data to be further fused to generate improved position estimates in challenging use cases – outdoor, indoor and mixed conditions (e.g. port applications between containers, urban traffic, and warehouses). Development of an Engineering Bread Board (EBB) is foreseen which integrates multiple heterogeneous sensors including odometer, visual cameras ranging sensors (e.g. LiDAR,), magnetometer compass, IMUs and multi-GNSS receiver. The emphasis is on using low cost sensors, analyzing relevant uses and development of AI / ML techniques as a standalone or complementary solution to analytical approaches. The overall objective is to exploit clusters of multiple low-cost sensors so that the combined measurement is accurate and robust under challenging conditions.
The project finally aims to demonstrate the EBB mounted on a vehicle and on a human operator, to validate the performance of the Data Fusion solutions in those challenging scenarios. The results obtained will be summarized in reports and the produced EBB will be
delivered to ESA to be used in further projects and research activities.