Development of an Italian low cost GNSS/INS system universally suitable for mobile mapping

The first studies for the mobile mapping and creation of a vehicle for this kind of research was carried out by Canadian Researchers in the 1980s. Since then, these vehicles have been widely employed in several applications (road cadastre maps, terrestrial photogrammetry, road sign recognition, etc.) for both commercial and research purposes throughout the world. Many GNSS/INS vehicles which can be equipped in different ways with one or more GPS, inertial sensors, and one or several cameras, have been realized. A characteristic shared by most of these devices concerns the high costs of the sensors, of the realization and of the maintenance. For this reason, a GNSS/INS system, that is suitable for any vehicle, made up of low cost devices (two GPS receivers, an INS, and a camera rigidly placed on a metallic bar), has been designed and built by our research group. Two tests run at different velocities have been carried out to evaluate the reliability of the system. After a presentation of the system, the differences that were witnessed during the application of these calibration methods are explained herein.