Low-Cost GNSS Heading Determination with Fixed Baseline Constraints

Objectives Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) heading determination is an important technology in the field of navigation. At present, the accuracy of high-performance GNSS heading determination receivers can reach 0.2°/m, which can satisfy the requirements of most applications, but the cost of 10 000 yuan hinders the mass market promotion. However, the observation redundancy and quality of the low-cost GNSS receivers are weaker than those of the high-performance GNSS receiver, which makes the heading determination accuracy and reliability of the low-cost GNSS receiver vulnerable to complex environments.

Methods In order to improve the performance of low-cost GNSS heading determination, a low-cost GNSS heading determination method with fixed baseline constraints is proposed. The method deploys fixed baseline constraints between the dual antennas and constructs real-time dynamic detection thresholds based on a posteriori variance-covariance of geometric baseline, which can effectively increase the success rate of integer ambiguity resolution, thus improving the accuracy and reliability of low-cost GNSS heading determination.

Results The proposed method was tested with real kinematic data. Compared to the traditional methods, the success rate of the integer ambiguity resolution was improved by 7.4%, and the heading determination accuracy of 0.40°/m was achieved.

Conclusions It is shown that the low-cost GNSS vectoring method with fixed baseline constraints can effectively increase the success rate of whole-period ambiguity solution and improve the accuracy and reliability of low-cost GNSS vectoring.