Dead reckoning using an accelerometer

James Baker

The project aim was to develop a technology that would provide a way of navigating when GPS signals could not be used. This includes tunnels, inside buildings and in the city. The proposed solution was to use a dead reckoning (an out dated method of navigating) to navigate using an accelerometer to detecting movement. The accelerometer acceleration samples would be double integrated to work out distance travelled in each direction. That is up and down, left and right, forward and backwards. A microcontroller would be used to control the device as well as an LCD screen and memory (EEPROM). The controller would be able to store the data to memory allowing it to imported into Excel after an experiment where the data can be manipulated. In the end a prototype was build but failed to produce accurate calculations. The accelerometer values were hard to calibrate and therefore small errors would encroach on the data. This caused huge problems when integrating and seemed to magnify the error. The prototype would then insist that it has travel vast distances when in fact it has barely moved or not moved at all. At the end of this document there are future recommendations. First of foremost, the calibration needs to be more accurate if the prototype to work. The two keys ways this would happen is if more samples could be taken to calibrate the accelerometer and/or the calibration value could have more decimal places.

Dead reckoning using an accelerometer

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