Resilient Smartphone Positioning using Native Sensors and PPP Augmentation

Abstract

With the ubiquitous inclusion of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) chips and antennas, navigation solutions from smartphones or other smart devices have become an integrated part of our daily lives for applications such as driving, vehicle sharing and more recently contact tracing. These GNSS receivers are considered ultra-low-cost and suffer from insufficient observations, signal blockage and outage, multipath effects, low signal power and noisy measurements. Since 2016, smartphone with the Android operating system can output raw GNSS pseudorange and carrier phase measurements, allowing researchers to improve smartphone navigation capabilities. The realm of sensor fusion is also being explored using smartphone’s sensors, including inertial measurement units (IMUs), cameras and other fusion techniques. The research presented in this research only deploys IMU and GNSS sensors native to existing smartphones and achieves a stand-alone solution using PPP/IMU integration that outperformed standard techniques. In open-sky vehicle experiments, the dual-frequency PPP/IMU sensor integration algorithm is able to achieve 1.6 m horizontal rms, reducing 80% of horizontal errors in GNSS-challenging environments through a tightly-coupled smartphone GNSS-PPP integrated solution that is yet to appear in any publications.