Deep Learning-Based GNSS Network-Based Real-Time Kinematic Improvement for Autonomous Ground Vehicle Navigation

Abstract

Much navigation over the last several decades has been aided by the global navigation satellite system (GNSS). In addition, with the advent of the multi-GNSS era, more and more satellites are available for navigation purposes. However, the navigation is generally carried out by point positioning based on the pseudoranges. The real-time kinematic (RTK) and the advanced technology, namely, the network RTK (NRTK), were introduced for better positioning and navigation. Further improved navigation was also investigated by combining other sensors such as the inertial measurement unit (IMU). On the other hand, a deep learning technique has been recently evolving in many fields, including automatic navigation of the vehicles. This is because deep learning combines various sensors without complicated analytical modeling of each individual sensor. In this study, we structured the multilayer recurrent neural networks (RNN) to improve the accuracy and the stability of the GNSS absolute solutions for the autonomous vehicle navigation. Specifically, the long short-term memory (LSTM) is an especially useful algorithm for time series data such as navigation with moderate speed of platforms. From an experiment conducted in a testing area, the LSTM algorithm developed the positioning accuracy by about 40% compared to GNSS-only navigation without any external bias information. Once the bias is taken care of, the accuracy will significantly be improved up to 8 times better than the GNSS absolute positioning results. The bias terms of the solution need to be estimated within the model by optimizing the layers as well as the nodes each layer, which should be done in further research.