The driving behavior of bus drivers is related to the safety of all passengers and regulation of urban traffic. In order to analyze the relevant characteristics of speed and acceleration, accurate bus trajectories and patterns are essential for driver behavior analysis and development of effective intelligent public transportation. Exploiting real-time vehicle tracking, this paper develops a platform with vehicle-mounted terminals using differential global navigation satellite system (DGNSS) modules for driver behavior analysis. The DGNSS traces were used to derive the vehicle trajectories, which were then linked to road information to produce speed and acceleration matrices. Comprehensive field tests were undertaken on multiple bus routes in urban environments. The spatiotemporal results indicate that the platform can automatically and accurately extract the driving behavior characteristics. Furthermore, the platform’s visual function can be used to effectively monitor driving risks, such as speeding and fierce acceleration, in multiple bus routes. The details of the platform’s features are provided for intelligent transport system (ITS) design and applications.
Continuous accurate positioning in global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-denied environments is essential for robot navigation. Significant advances have been made with light detection and ranging (LiDAR)-inertial measurement unit (IMU) techniques, especially in challenging environments with varying lighting and other complexities. However, the LiDAR/IMU method relies on a recursive positioning principle, resulting in the gradual accumulation and dispersion of errors over time. To address these challenges, this study proposes a tightly coupled LiDAR/IMU/UWB fusion approach that integrates an ultra-wideband (UWB) positioning technique. First, a lightweight point cloud segmentation and constraint algorithm is designed to minimize elevation errors and reduce computational demands. Second, a multi-decision non-line-of-sight (NLOS) recognition module using information entropy is employed to mitigate NLOS errors. Finally, a tightly coupled framework via a resilient mechanism is proposed to achieve reliable position estimation for quadruped robots. Experimental results demonstrate that our system provides robust positioning results even in LiDAR-limited and NLOS conditions, maintaining low time costs.
Fingerprinting-based Wi-Fi positioning has increased in popularity due to its existing infrastructure and wide coverage. However, in the offline phase of fingerprinting positioning, the construction and maintenance of a Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprint database yield high labor. Moreover, the sparsity and stability of RSS fingerprinting datasets can be the most dominant error sources. This work proposes a minimally Semi-simulated RSS Fingerprinting (SS-RSS) method to generate and maintain dense fingerprints from real spatially coarse RSS acquisitions. This work simulates dense fingerprints exploring the cosine similarity of the directions to Wi-Fi access points (APs), rather than only using either a log-distance path-loss model, a quadratic polynomial fitting, or a spatial interpolation method. Real-world experiment results indicate that the semi-simulated method performs better than the coarse fingerprints and close to the real dense fingerprints. Particularly, the model of RSS measurements, the ratio of the simulated fingerprints to all fingerprints, and a two dimensions (2D) spatial distribution have been analyzed. The average positioning accuracy achieves up to 1.01 m with 66.6% of the semi-simulation ratio. The SS-RSS method offers a solution for coarse fingerprint-based positioning to perform a fine resolution without a time-consuming site-survey.
With the increasing application potential of indoor personnel positioning, ultra‐wideband (UWB) positioning technology has attracted more and more attentions of scholars. In practice, an indoor positioning process often involves multipath and Non‐Line‐Of‐Sight (NLOS) problems, and a particle filtering (PF) algorithm has been widely used in the indoor positioning research field because of its outstanding performance in nonlinear and non‐Gaussian estimations. Aiming at mitigating the accuracy decreasing caused by the particle degradation and impoverishment in traditional Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) positioning, we propose a method to integrate the firefly and particle algorithm for multistage optimization. The proposed algorithm not only enhances the searching ability of particles of initialization but also makes the particles propagate out of the local optimal condition in the sequential estimations. In addition, to prevent particles from falling into the oscillatory situation and find the global optimization faster, a decreasing function is designed to improve the reliability of the particle propagation. Real indoor experiments are carried out, and results demonstrate that the positioning accuracy can be improved up to 36%, and the number of needed particles is significantly reduced.
Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of microelectromechanical systems, and human motion tracking technology based on IMU (inertial measurement unit) has attracted much attention. However, the magnetic field varies with time and position, which makes it necessary to calibrate sensors before tracking. To address the poor adaptability of IMU to the environments and improve the accuracy of estimated traces, this paper presents an ENN-based (Elman neural network) method to track human arm motions, which consists of two steps. First, the data derived from IMUs are preprocessed for the rough Euler angles; then, an ENN is trained to estimate motions. We explore the initially estimated position to calibrate the acceleration measurements as the input of the ENN. Real-world experiments of arm motion tracking are carried out with the ground truth from an optical motion tracking system. The experimental results show that the mean tracking errors are around 35 mm, with a strong ability to eliminate the effect of extreme measurement and environment noises, avoiding calibrating the magnetometer. The implementation of the well-trained model to independent motions indicates that the robustness of the proposed method is excellent, and the errors reduce by 37.2% on the -axis and perform similarly on the -axis compared with 4 traditional methods. This method quite suits those situations where trajectory tracking of the standardized motions is required, such as the medical habilitation.
Pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) uses built-in sensors in smartphones to track user positions, offering both versatility and portability. However, diversities among individuals and their behavior patterns decrease positioning accuracy. In this study, a two-stage personalized pedestrian dead reckoning based on neural networks (P2Net) is proposed. The first stage employs a human activity and smartphone location recognition (HSR) module, integrating a convolutional neural network with focal loss (FLCNN) to recognize nine modes, which constrains the subsequent optimized PDR procedure. In the second stage, a hybrid feature temporal attention network (HFTAN) is constructed to achieve generalized step length estimation across individual diversities. Temporal features via temporal convolutional network (TCN) and physical features are combined to generate hybrid features with time-series modeling capability and interpretability, which are then fed into a bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) model with a feature attention mechanism to estimate pedestrian step length. Experimental results demonstrate that P2Net achieves a class average accuracy of 92.75% for nine modes, and the total traveled distance error under various states is within 10%, outperforming other mentioned positioning methods.