Improving ambiguity resolution with common-antenna-based dual-board receiver for low-cost real-time kinematic positioning

Abstract

Ambiguity resolution is of critical importance to the carrier phase-based real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning method. Improving the accuracy of float ambiguities is beneficial for achieving ambiguity resolution. However, the large measurement noise from low-cost receivers will worsen the estimation accuracy of float ambiguities, which affects the ambiguity resolution performance. In this contribution, to reduce the influence of large measurement noise on ambiguity resolution for low-cost receivers, an improved RTK method for ambiguity resolution is proposed to enhance the accuracy of float ambiguities by equipping the rover receiver with common-antenna-based dual global navigation satellite system (GNSS) boards instead of only one GNSS board. First, the dual-board design can increase the measurement redundancy of the same frequency to suppress the measurement noise. Second, because the common-antenna design can form a moving zero-baseline between the dual GNSS boards, the ambiguities between them can be easily fixed. Known fixed ambiguities can be used as constraints to strengthen the positioning model. Simulation and real-world static and kinematic experiments were conducted to test the proposed method. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the accuracy of float ambiguities by increasing the redundancy of the measurements and introducing the constraints of the ambiguities, and the improved accuracy is about 20%. Compared with the traditional single-board RTK method, better ambiguity resolution performance can be achieved by taking advantage of the proposed common-antenna-based RTK method.