Improved ambiguity resolution for URTK with dynamic atmosphere constraints

Abstract

Raw observation processing method with prior knowledge of ionospheric delay could strengthen the ambiguity resolution (AR), but it does not make full use of the relatively longer wavelength of wide-lane (WL) observation. Furthermore, the accuracy of calculated atmospheric delays from the regional augmentation information has quite different in quality, while the atmospheric constraint used in the current methods is usually set to an empirical value. A proper constraint, which matches the accuracy of calculated atmospheric delays, can most effectively compensate the residual systematic biases caused by large inter-station distances. Therefore, the standard deviation of the residual atmospheric parameters should be fine-tuned. This paper presents an atmosphere-constrained AR method for undifferenced network RTK (URTK) rover, whose ambiguities are sequentially fixed according to their wavelengths. Furthermore, this research systematically analyzes the residual atmospheric error and finds that it mainly varies along the positional relationship between the rover and the chosen reference stations. More importantly, its ionospheric part of certain location will also be cyclically influenced every day. Therefore, the standard deviation of residual ionospheric error can be modeled by a daily repeated cosine or other functions with the help of data one day before, and applied by rovers as pseudo-observation. With the data collected at 29 stations from a continuously operating reference station network in Guangdong Province (GDCORS) in China, the efficiency of the proposed approach is confirmed by improving the success and error rates of AR for 10-20 % compared to that of the WL-L1-IF one, as well as making much better positioning accuracy.