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RANSAC-based instantaneous real-time kinematic positioning with GNSS triple-frequency signals in urban areas

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Abstract

The demand for high-precision positioning has risen substantially in modern urban settings. In that regard, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) offer several advantages such as global coverage, real-time capability, high accuracy, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness. The accuracy of GNSS-based positioning, however, suffers in urban environments due to signal blockage, reflection, and diffraction, which makes it difficult to fix ambiguities correctly within a real-time kinematic (RTK). To address this issue, this paper applies random sample consensus (RANSAC) to develop a novel single-epoch triple-frequency RTK positioning method. In our proposed method, the ambiguities of the extra-wide-lane, wide-lane, and original frequencies are resolved sequentially. RANSAC then detects and excludes incorrectly fixed ambiguities. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, two static experiments (cases 1 and 2) and one dynamic experiment (case 3) were conducted in representative urban areas. The findings demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms all comparative methods in positional availability, with comparable positional accuracy in terms of root-mean-square errors (RMSEs). In cases 1, 2, and 3, the proposed method achieves 3D RMSEs of 2.74, 4.29, and 20.35 cm, and the positional availabilities of 100%, 75.0%, and 73.1%, using a 10-degree mask angle (and a carrier-to-noise ratio (C/N0) threshold 35 dB-Hz). The corresponding RMSEs (positional availabilities) of comparative methods are from 1.51 to 4.04 cm (75.7 to 96.3%) in case 1, 4.19 to 7.78 cm (34.5 to 49.9%) in case 2, and 23.52 to 37.54 cm (15.4 to 33.9%) in case 3, respectively. Compared to these methods, the proposed method shows improvements of positional availabilities between 3.7 and 24.3 percentage points in case 1, between 25.1 and 40.5 percentage points in case 2, and between 39.2 and 57.7 percentage points in case 3.

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Data availability

The data that support the results of this study are available from the corresponding author for academic purposes on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the sponsorship of the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong under the scheme Research Impact Fund (Grant No. R5009-21), the Research Institute of Land and System, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41974033, 42174025), and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. BK20211569).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Land Survey and Geo-Informatics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

    Qi Cheng, Wu Chen, Junhui Wang & Duojie Weng

  2. College of Civil Aviation, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 211106, China

    Rui Sun

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  1. Qi Cheng
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  2. Wu Chen
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  3. Rui Sun
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  4. Junhui Wang
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QC and WC designed this method; QC conducted the experiments, analysed the data, and drafted this manuscript; WC, RS, JHW,and DJW revised this manuscript.

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Correspondence to Rui Sun.

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Cheng, Q., Chen, W., Sun, R. et al. RANSAC-based instantaneous real-time kinematic positioning with GNSS triple-frequency signals in urban areas. J Geod 98, 24 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-024-01833-6

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