Improving Vehicle Positioning Performance in Urban Environment with Tight Integration of Multi-GNSS PPP-RTK/INS

Abstract

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals are easily blocked by urban canyons, tree-lined roads, and overpasses in urban environments, making it impossible to ensure continuous and reliable positioning using only GNSS, even with the widely used precise point positioning and real-time kinematic (PPP-RTK). Since the inertial navigation system (INS) and GNSS are complementary, a tightly coupled PPP-RTK/INS model is developed to improve the positioning performance in these GNSS-challenged scenarios, in which the atmospheric corrections are used to achieve a rapid ambiguity resolution and the mechanization results from INS are utilized to assist GNSS preprocessing, re-fixing, and reconvergence. The experiment was conducted using three sets of vehicle-mounted data, and the performance of low-cost receiver and microelectromechanical system (MEMS) inertial measurement unit (IMU) was compared. The result shows that the positioning accuracy of PPP-RTK/INS can reach 2 cm in the horizontal component and 5 cm in the vertical component in the open environment. In the complex urban environment, continuous and reliable positioning can be ensured during GNSS short interruption, ambiguity can be instantaneously re-fixed with the assistance of INS, and decimeter-level positioning accuracy can be achieved. As a result, the horizontal positioning errors of more than 95% of the total epochs were within 20 cm. In addition, average positioning accuracy better than 15 cm and 30 cm in the horizontal and vertical components, respectively, can be obtained using the low-cost receiver and MEMS IMU. Compared with tactical IMU, the improvements in positioning accuracy and the ambiguity fixing rate using the geodetic receiver were more significant.