A Wi-Fi/GPS integrated system for urban vehicle positioning

Providing an anytime, ubiquitous and reliable vehicular positioning system plays a key role in increasing road safety and transportation efficiency. Although the Global Positioning System (GPS) has been widely used in vehicle navigation, urban vehicle positioning is still a challenge because of the unavailability of GPS in dense metropolitan areas. To solve this problem, an advanced integration of Wi-Fi and GPS is presented in this paper. It uses Wi-Fi Received Signal Strength (RSS), GPS measurement and vehicle kinematics to estimate the vehicle position. To leverage the strength of Wi-Fi and GPS, a structure based on Kalman Filter (KF) and Particle Filter (PF) is proposed. Besides, outdoor experiments have been carried out in real environment to test performance of proposed system. Numerical results suggest that the proposed system can achieve higher accuracy and more reliability than existing GPS system.