Design, Implementation and Validation of a GNSS Measurement Exclusion and Weighting Function with a Dual Polarized Antenna.

Daniel Egea-Roca,Bruno Bougard,Antonio Tripiana-Caballero,Alexander Popugaev,Gonzalo Seco-Granados,Jean-Marie Sleewaegen,José López-Salcedo,Wim De Wilde

doi:10.3390/s18124483

Abstract

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs) have become a ubiquitous tool for our modern society to carry out vital tasks such as transportation, civil engineering or precision agriculture. This breath has reached the realm of safety-critical applications such as time management of critical infrastructures or autonomous vehicles, in which GNSS is an essential tool nowadays. Unfortunately, current GNSS performance is not enough to fulfill the requirements of these professional and critical applications. For this reason, the FANTASTIC project was launched to boost the adoption of these applications. The project was funded by the European GNSS agency (GSA) in order to enhance the robustness and accuracy of GNSS in harsh environments. This paper presents the part related to the development of a weighting and exclusion function with a dual circularly polarized antenna. The idea is to reduce the effects of multipath by weighting and/or excluding those measurements affected by multipath. The observables and other metrics obtained from a dual polarized antenna will be exploited to define an exclusion threshold and to provide the weights. Real-world experiments will show the improvement in the positioning solution, using all available constellations, obtained with the developed technique.

Highlights

Professional applications based on global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) are getting a significant boost in terms of adoption and absolute performance, mainly driven by the growing number of satellites and signals
In the previous sections we have demonstrated the capability of the 2pol antenna to detect the presence of NLOS and to provide a good match between the proposed measurement weighting and the measured error standard deviations
A novel weighting and exclusion function has been proposed and demonstrated using real data collected within the framework of the FANTASTIC project

Summary

Introduction

Professional applications based on global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) are getting a significant boost in terms of adoption and absolute performance, mainly driven by the growing number of satellites and signals. The wide use of correction services like SBAS (e.g., EGNOS), precise point positioning and regional and nation-wide real time kinematics (RTK) networks, can offer sub-decimeter accuracy. This cutting edge accuracy is not enough for a large variety of emerging applications posing very stringent requirements. These applications include the control of driverless machineries in precision farming, autonomous vehicles, and GNSS-based systems resilient to interference, just to mention a few. The aim of this paper is to show the developed function in the FANTASTIC project to weight and exclude observables based on the above concept. The goal of the proposed weighting and exclusion (WE) function is to reduce the effects of multipath into the Position, Velocity and Time (PVT) solution

Objectives

Results

Conclusion