Global positioning system (GPS) is widely used to measure the position of a vehicle. However, the accuracy of the GPS can be severely affected by surrounding environmental conditions. To deal with this problem, the GPS and odometry data can be combined using an extended Kalman filter. For stable navigation of an outdoor mobile robot using the GPS, this paper proposes two methods to evaluate the reliability of the GPS data. The first method is to calculate the standard deviation of the GPS data and reflect it to deal with the uncertainty of the GPS data. The second method is to match the GPS data to the traversability map which can be obtained by classifying outdoor terrain data. By matching of the GPS data with the traversability map, we can determine whether to use the GPS data or not. The experimental results show that the proposed methods can enhance the performance of the GPS‐based outdoor localization.

In this paper, we developed the Realtime Ship Position Information System and the software in relation to the system, which consists of the on-board system and the shore-based system. The on-board system is composed a GPS receiver, a computer, and a modem. The shore-based system is composed of a telephone, a modem and a computer. Both systems are operated by the data communication program The system displays automatically the ship's movement on the digital chart by using the ship's position acquired by a GPS receiver via INMARSAT-A communication system. The results presented in many experiments indicate that the system in processing the position data well during the transmission and reception.