Abstract
Centimetre accurate geolocation service is beneficial to a wide range of applications, ranging from sports engineering, civil infrastructure, autonomous vehicles, surveying to digitisation of historically significant structures. Previously, these features were confined to prohibitively expensive commercial hardware, requiring technical knowledge and experience to operate. Continued technological advancements have seen the miniaturisation of electronics and antennas, coupled with an increase in the number and performance of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) by various nations and organisations, providing global signal coverage. This paper demonstrates a low-cost, mobile, real-time kinematic (RTK) geolocation service for engineering and research applications, fabricated from components readily available from commercial suppliers. This solution, consisting of a mobile RTK base station and RTK rover, provides centimetre-accuracy performance up to a distance of 15 km away from the base station. Correction data is transmitted over the internet using free and open software solutions. The small footprint of both the RTK base station and RTK rover, provides versatile applications even in remote locations. The performance of the geolocation service is validated using field experiments, comparing measurements against state-of-the-art photogrammetry, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and digital level measurement technologies. The authors encourage the adoption of the RTK geolocation solution based on the calibrated results.
Highlights
Centimetre accurate geolocation service is beneficial to a wide range of applications, ranging from sports engineering, civil infrastructure, autonomous vehicles, surveying to digitisation of historically significant structures
This paper demonstrates a low-cost, mobile, real-time kinematic (RTK) geolocation service for engineering and research applications, fabricated from components readily available from commercial suppliers
This paper presents the development, construction, configuration, deployment and verification of a low-cost, mobile RTK global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) geolocation service developed at the Engineering 4.0 facility at the University of Pretoria, which consists of both a fixed RTK base station and an RTK rover
Summary
Against the backdrop of the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR), cost-effective, digital condition monitoring of infrastructure is receiving renewed interest. This paper presents the development, construction, configuration, deployment and verification of a low-cost, mobile RTK GNSS geolocation service developed at the Engineering 4.0 facility at the University of Pretoria, which consists of both a fixed RTK base station and an RTK rover. Whilst this implementation is not new [26], the miniaturised hardware and streamlined software significantly reduces the complexity associated with developing and operating such a system. The RTK implementation utilises commercially available components in a small form factor, providing a versatile and highly configurable solution for a range of research and testing applications, without the costs and limitations associated with comparable commercial offerings
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