Roll Rate Estimation for Cylindrical Spinning Vehicle Based on Pseudorange Observations

Abstract

Roll rate estimation is essential to attitude measurement. During the processing of baseband signals, it is complicated to measure the vehicle rolling attitude, based on the energy features of existing satellite signals. To measure the energy of received signals in real time, the data communication interface and storage unit of the receiving device must be customized. However, the customization will push up the cost of attitude sensors, and result in processing delays. To solve the problem, this paper measures the vehicle roll rate by the variation features of pseudorange observations, which are easy to acquire and highly applicable. Specifically, the roll rate of a cylindrical spinning vehicle was estimated, using Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver with single side-mounted antenna. After analyzing the variation of pseudorange observations, the authors calculated the roll rate of the cylindrical spinning vehicle based on the variation rules. The proposed approach was verified through experiments with simulated GNSS signals. The accuracy of our approach was measured at different rotation speeds and translational speeds. The results show that our approach can accurately estimate the roll rate when the standard deviations of noise is less than 1m for pseudorange measurement.