Performance Assessment of BDS-2/BDS-3/GPS/Galileo Attitude Determination Based on the Single-Differenced Model with Common-Clock Receivers

Mingkui Wu,Wanke Liu,Wang Wang,Shuai Luo

doi:10.3390/rs13234845

Mingkui Wu, Wanke Liu + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13234845

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Journal: Remote sensing	Publication Date: Nov 29, 2021
Citations: 7	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: China University of Geosciences, Wuhan University

Abstract

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based attitude determination has been widely applied in a variety of fields due to its high precision, no error accumulation, low power consumption, and low cost. Recently, the emergence of common-clock receivers and construction of GNSS systems have brought new opportunities for high-precision GNSS-based attitude determination. In this contribution, we focus on evaluating the performance of the BeiDou regional navigation satellite system (BDS-2)/BeiDou global navigation satellite system (BDS-3)/Global Positioning System (GPS)/Galileo navigation satellite system (Galileo) attitude determination based on the single-differenced (SD) model with a common-clock receiver. We first investigate the time-varying characteristics of BDS-2/BDS-3/GPS/Galileo line bias (LB) with two different types of common-clock receivers. The results have confirmed that both the phase and code LBs are relatively stable in the time domain once the receivers have started. However, the phase LB is expected to change to an arbitrary value after each restart of the common-clock receivers. For the first time, it is also found that the phase LBs of overlapping frequencies shared by different GNSS systems are identical. Then, we primarily evaluated the performance of BDS-2/BDS-3/GPS/Galileo precise relative positioning and attitude determination based on the SD model with a common-clock receiver, using a static dataset collected at Wuhan. Experimental results demonstrated that, compared with the double-differenced (DD) model, the SD model can deliver a comparable root–mean–square (RMS) error of yaw but a significantly smaller RMS error of pitch, whether for BDS-2, BDS-3, GPS, or Galileo alone or a combination of them. The improvements of pitch accuracy are approximately 20.8–47.5% and 40.7–57.5% with single- and dual-frequency observations, respectively. Additionally, BDS-3 can deliver relatively superior positioning and attitude accuracy with respect to GPS and Galileo, due to its better geometry. The three-dimensional positioning and attitude (including yaw and pitch) accuracy for both the DD and SD models can be remarkably improved by the BDS-2, BDS-3, GPS, and Galileo combination with respect to a single system alone.

Highlights

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based attitude determination has been extensively investigated over the past few decades and has proven to be a cost-effective and reliable means to obtain three-dimensional high-precision attitude information for land vehicles, ships or aircrafts [1,2,3,4,5]
The mean values of phase line bias (LB) for Global Positioning System (GPS) L1/L5 signals are 0.512/0.159 cycles, which can be regarded as equal to Galileo navigation satellite system (Galileo) E1/E5a signals (0.514/0.159 cycles), implying that the phase observations from overlapping frequencies of different GNSS systems can be treated as if they are from one constellation in the SD model
With regard to the characterization of LBs, for the first time, it is found that for overlapping frequencies shared by different GNSS systems, their phase LBs are identical and they can be treated as if they are from one constellation in the SD model

Summary

Introduction

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based attitude determination has been extensively investigated over the past few decades and has proven to be a cost-effective and reliable means to obtain three-dimensional high-precision attitude information (i.e., yaw, pitch, and roll) for land vehicles, ships or aircrafts [1,2,3,4,5]. A well-known problem with the DD model is that the achievable accuracy of the baseline vectors in the vertical component is two to three times inferior to that in the horizontal components [16,17,18], which further results in significantly lower accuracy of pitch and roll than yaw This phenomenon is caused by the strong vertical geometry inhomogeneity of the satellite sky distribution (which could result in the fact that some systematic biases in the observations could propagate more adversely in the vertical component of the baseline vector) and the high correlation between vertical component and the estimated receiver clock or tropospheric parameters [16,17]

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