Inertial measurement units (IMUs) are key components of various applications including navigation, robotics, aerospace, and automotive systems. IMU sensor characteristics have a significant impact on the accuracy and reliability of these applications. In particular, noise characteristics and bias stability are critical for proper filter settings to perform a combined GNSS/IMU solution. This paper presents an analysis based on the Allan deviation of different IMU sensors that correspond to different grades of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS)-type IMUs in order to evaluate their accuracy and stability over time. The study covers three IMU sensors of different grades (ascending order): Rokubun Argonaut navigator sensor (InvenSense TDK MPU9250), Samsung Galaxy Note10 phone sensor (STMicroelectronics LSM6DSR), and NovAtel PwrPak7 sensor (Epson EG320N). The noise components of the sensors are computed using overlapped Allan deviation analysis on data collected over the course of a week in a static position. The focus of the analysis is to characterize the random walk noise and bias stability, which are the most critical for combined GNSS/IMU navigation and may differ or may not be listed in manufacturers’ specifications. Noise characteristics are calculated for the studied sensors and examples of their use in loosely coupled GNSS/IMU processing are assessed. This work proposes a structured and reproducible approach for working with sensors for their use in navigation tasks in combination with GNSS, and can be used for sensors of different levels to supplement missing or incorrect sensor manufacturers’ data.

The inertial navigation system (INS) and global satellite navigation system (GNSS) are two of the most significant systems for land navigation applications. The inertial measurement unit (IMU) is a kind of INS sensor that measures three-dimensional acceleration and angular velocity measurements. IMUs based on micro-electromechanical systems (MEMSs) are widely employed in vehicular navigation thanks to their low cost and small size, but their magnitude and noisy biases make navigation errors diverge very fast without external constraint. The zero-velocity update (ZVU) function is one of the efficient functions that constrain the divergence of IMUs for a stopped vehicle, and the key of the ZVU is the correct stationary detection for the vehicle. When a land vehicle is stopped, the idling engine produces a very stable vibration, which allows us to perform frequency analysis and a comparison based on the fast Fourier transform (FFT) and IMU measurements. Hence, we propose a stationary detection method based on the FFT for a stopped land vehicle with an idling engine in this study. An urban vehicular navigation experiment was carried out with our GNSS/IMU integration platform. Three stops for 10 to 20 min were set to analyze, generate and evaluate the FFT-based stationary detection method. The FFT spectra showed clearly idling vibrational peaks during the three stop periods. Through the comparison of FFT spectral features with decelerating and accelerating periods, the amplitudes of vibrational peaks were put forward as the key factors of stationary detection. For the consecutive stationary detection in the GNSS/IMU integration process, a three-second sliding window with a one-second updating rate of the FFT was applied to check the amplitudes of peaks. For the assessment of the proposed stationary detection method, GNSS observations were removed to simulate outages during the three stop periods, and the proposed detection method was conducted together with the ZVU. The results showed that the proposed method achieved a 99.7% correct detection rate, and the divergence of the positioning error constrained via the ZVU was within 2 cm for the experimental stop periods, which indicates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

High-precision GNSS services typically rely on dense reference networks to model atmospheric delays effectively. However, maintaining such infrastructure is often impractical in vast or developing regions. This study evaluates the feasibility of Precise Point Positioning with Ambiguity Resolution (PPP-AR) using a minimal network configuration consisting of only four Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS).We focus on quantifying the spatial degradation of positioning accuracy as the distance from the reference network increases. By generating corrections from this sparse cluster, we analyze performance metrics including convergence time, fixing rate, and coordinate precision across rovers located at varying baselines from the network centroid.The results demonstrate a clear correlation between distance and accuracy degradation, specifically highlighting the impact of residual ionospheric and tropospheric errors. Despite this degradation, the study confirms that PPP-AR can maintain reliable centimeter-level positioning well beyond the limits of traditional Network RTK (NRTK). These findings provide empirical guidelines for deploying cost-effective GNSS infrastructure with optimized station density.