Car rollovers are a class of serious traffic accidents that can easily cause heavy casualties and property damage, particularly for special operation vehicles. To enhance the driving stability of vehicles on forest roads, we developed a control strategy for wire-controlled auxiliary braking based on body-attitude detection and the overall design of the system. Moreover, the control system was further investigated and developed. A three-degrees-of-freedom (3-DOF) vehicle dynamics model with longitudinal, lateral, and lateral tilt was developed based on actual-vehicle test data. The lateral load-transfer rate (LTR) of the vehicle was selected as the early warning algorithm for vehicle rollover; the differential braking of the vehicle was realized by adjusting the pressure of the wheel cylinders; and automatic speed reduction was achieved according to the rollover attitude of the vehicle by combining the fuzzy-PID control algorithm. Finally, a vehicle dynamics model was developed, and the results verified the effectiveness of the anti-rollover control strategy under extreme operating conditions.

High-accuracy heading angle is significant for estimating autonomous vehicle attitude. By integrating GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) dual antennas, INS (Inertial Navigation System), and a barometer, a GNSS/INS/Barometer fusion method is proposed to improve vehicle heading angle accuracy. An adaptive Kalman filter (AKF) is designed to fuse the INS error and the GNSS measurement. A random sample consensus (RANSAC) method is proposed to improve the initial heading angle accuracy applied to the INS update. The GNSS heading angle obtained by a dual-antenna orientation algorithm is additionally augmented to the measurement variable. Furthermore, the kinematic constraint of zero velocity in the lateral and vertical directions of vehicle movement is used to enhance the accuracy of the measurement model. The heading errors in the open and occluded environment are 0.5418° (RMS) and 0.636° (RMS), which represent reductions of 37.62% and 47.37% compared to the extended Kalman filter (EKF) method, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively improves the vehicle heading angle accuracy.

There are many demands for the cooperative localization (CL) of multiple people, such as firefighter rescue. The classical foot-mounted inertial navigation based on zero velocity update (ZUPT) suffers from accumulating error due to the low-cost inertial sensor, and the pre-placed anchors in the ultra-wideband (UWB) system limit the application in an unknown environment. In this study, a group of sensors including the inertial measurement unit (IMU), magnetometer, barometer, and UWB sensor is used. Through the different characteristics of sensors and the position relationship between people, a cooperative localization system using an extended Kalman filter for three-dimensional firefighter tracking is proposed. Ranging information between firefighters from UWB is utilized, and couplings introduced by relative measurement are estimated. Two experiments are designed to verify the proposed algorithm in building and forest environments. Compared with the results of single-person inertial navigation, the average positioning precision of the algorithm in the building and forest is, respectively, improved by 38.93% and 79.01%. This approach successfully suppresses the divergence of positioning errors, and fixed UWB anchors are not needed.

In the field of autonomous driving progresses, obtaining the precise position and attitude of vehicles through measurement technology is vital. An integrated GNSS/INS/Barometer (Global Navigation Satellite System/Inertial Navigation System/Barometer) fusion method is proposed to improve vehicle positioning and heading angle accuracy. An extended Kalman filter (EKF) based on horizontal dilution of precision (HDOP) is designed to fuse the INS error and the GNSS measurement. Furthermore, GNSS dual antennas are utilized to increase a state variable in EKF based on HDOP in addition to position and velocity. The kinematic constraint of zero velocity in the lateral and vertical directions of vehicle movement is used to measure the mounting angle to reduce error. The position and heading angle accuracy of the proposed method are 0.483 m and 1.358°, which represent reductions of 37.03% and 43.86% compared to the conventional EKF method, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can measure accurate position and heading angle in both open and occluded environments.

Pedestrian localization using a single IMU has limitations such as high localization error, low system robustness, and weak anti-interference capability. Multi-IMU localization can improve the reliability of the solution by compensating the errors with each other. A new pedestrian inertial navigation system (PINS) model is proposed based on the kinematic model of human’s double lower limbs and waist in this study. The pedestrian gait is classified into three kinds. Pedestrians have at least one foot in the support phase when walking or striding. By using the velocity of the foot that remains relatively stationary with the ground as a benchmark and applying the Coriolis theorem, the velocities of the remaining points can be derived. The velocity and position constraint relationship between human lower limbs and waist are fully established to enhance the positioning accuracy in the whole process of pedestrian walking. The pedestrian’s velocity, position, and attitude are estimated by Kalman filters and Mahony filters. Through experiments, it is verified that the proposed method outperforms the unilateral lower limb kinematics-constrained PINS algorithm and the inequality constrained bipedal PINS algorithm in both flat terrain and forest terrain.

Single-sensor zero-velocity-update (ZUPT)-aided pedestrian inertial navigation system (PINS) is a conventional method. However, the single-sensor systematic error still causes imprecise estimation of step length and high drift of orientation. In this study, three magnetometers and inertial measurement units are mounted on single-leg toe, shank, and thigh, respectively. Gaits are divided into two phases: stance and swing. Based on the biomechanical characteristics of a human lower limb, a velocity-position estimation algorithm is proposed. The positions of the three sensors are fused by dynamic geometric relationships, which are formulated through the natural lower-limb model and attitude estimation. A velocity-difference constraint is proposed to suppress the divergence of velocity, and Coriolis-based velocity correction is designed to observe velocities of the toe, shank, and thigh at the stance phase. A MAHONY-linear-Kalman framework separately estimates attitudes, velocities, and positions to reduce calculations. The proposed method is compared with foot-mounted, shank-mounted, and thigh-mounted ZUPT-aided PINS as well as a dual-sensor foot-to-foot algorithm through experiments. In the flat terrain experiment, compared with the errors of the Shank-mounted INS, the Thigh-mounted INS, the Foot-mounted INS, the Foot-to-Foot Constraint Method, the root mean squared error (RMSE) of the proposed method can be reduced by 40.34%, 71.85%, 29.53%, and 7.08%, respectively. In the slope experiment, compared with the other four methods, the RMSE of the proposed method can be reduced by 80%, 86.74%, 67.54%, and 61.86%, respectively. In the natural terrain experiment, compared with the other four methods, the RMSE of the proposed method can be reduced by 81.63%, 96.27%, 70%, and 60.87% respectively. The results show that the proposed method greatly suppresses the positioning and orientation errors in different scenes.