Nonlinear Regression-Based GNSS Multipath Dynamic Map Construction and Its Application in Deep Urban Areas

Abstract

GNSS signals are easily blocked or degraded because of the dense presence of high-rise buildings in urban areas, and positioning errors arising from reflected signals amount to as much as hundreds of meters. Various conventional GNSS techniques have been utilized to resolve this problem, but applying them to urban environments has been difficult owing to the complexity of the reflected signals and their unpredictable and nonlinear variation to the signal receiving environments. In this study, multipath maps were generated for dynamic users at multiple positions on a road and a residual-based map selection algorithm was implemented to solve the problem of user position uncertainty in deep urban environments. GNSS data collected over a period of 327 min were used to train the multipath maps corresponding to 247 points near the 2.5 km stretch of the Teheran-ro road in Seoul, South Korea. The proposed system performed efficiently—it was verified to be capable of constructing a multipath map with a radius of 25 m using only 4 min of data. Moreover, it improved positioning accuracy by 45 % horizontally and by 80 % vertically, enabling the determination of the positional information of an urban vehicle with a horizontal accuracy of 18 m during 99% of the duration of a one-hour-long dynamic test. Due to the nonreliance of the proposed method on prior information or implementation of additional sensors, it is expected to be widely used for constructing map-based multipath mitigation models as part of intelligent transportation infrastructure in all cities in future.