Friday, August 22, 2008

Smoothing, filtering and navigation

Though I knew that Kalman filter is typically used to correct noisy sensor data, I haven't supposed that there are BOOKS (Global Positioning Systems, Inertial Navigation, and Integration and Kalman Filtering: Theory and Practice Using MATLAB) written on how to apply Kalman filter to combine GPS and accelerometer data to improve localization quality. It seems also that implementing a Kalman filter is not quite a trivial task (one have to take care to avoid the lost of preciseness caused by that the real numbers are stored with limited accuracy only). All in all, I have to read more to be able to implement smoothing algorithm in a correct way. So, I'm not doing any smoothing in the 1.0 and postpone it to a later version.

For those unfamiliar with the subject: smoothing should enable creation of smooth pathways with minimal number of intermediate points directly during the collection of a GPS log. No manual paths creation should be required during the map editing any more.

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