Tightly coupled integration of Visible Light Positioning, GNSS, and INS for indoor/outdoor transition areas

Seamless indoor/outdoor (IO) positioning is crucial for enabling smart cities and the Internet of Things (IoT). While various systems, such as the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and Ultra Wide Band (UWB), are commonly used for positioning indoors and outdoors. However, the transition between these environments presents significant challenges due to weak satellite signals and difficulties in deploying wireless systems. To address this, we propose a novel positioning system that integrates Visible Light Positioning (VLP), GNSS, and Inertial Navigation System (INS), effectively categorizing IO status into four phases: indoor, semi-indoor, semi-outdoor, and outdoor. By dynamically estimating coordinate transformation parameters to link global and local coordinate systems, our system makes indoor and outdoor navigation more seamless. Compared to current seamless positioning systems that only reach sub-meter to meter level accuracy, this multi-sensor integration achieves an average positioning accuracy of 10 to 20 centimeters in two representative IO transition scenarios. •Tightly coupled integrated navigation of visible light positioning, GNSS, and INS.•Indoor/outdoor status includes indoor, semi-indoor, semi-outdoor, and outdoor.•Triple-difference GNSS observations are used to constrain the position changes.•Optimize the ambiguity resolution to avoid incorrect fixing.•Simultaneously estimate the poses and the coordinate transformation parameters.