High Integrity Reference Trajectory for Benchmarking Land Navigation Data Fusion Methods

In the framework of a joint initiative of several French laboratories that investigate land navigation, the authors have designed an architecture and tests protocol for benchmarking altogether data fusion methods applied on a collection of sensors covering the complete range of quality. Special attention has been given to sensors data timestamping since the benchmarking is based on the comparison of computed trajectories with the reference trajectory, so called because its computation fuses the most advanced sensors. A device called SensorHub that allows hardware based multi-sensor data timestamping was used. Real-time but also post-process estimations of the reference trajectory where provided by the combination of kinematic GPS and LandlNS, a high precision IMU provided by IXSea. Beyond the precision of these estimated trajectories (that highly depends on how long the roving GPS receiver was masked), the relevance of the computed integrity is emphasized in this article.