Abstract
GNSS observation outage occurs inevitably in various situations, e.g., automobile driving in urban environments. Although the ambiguity resolution (AR) significantly shortens the initialization time of precise point positioning (PPP), frequent re-initialization of PPP AR may be needed due to outages. The inertial navigation system (INS) can be used for acquiring highly accurate position information during GNSS outages. In the previous studies, the GPS PPP/INS with the ambiguity resolution model is proposed, and the experimental results confirm that the INS could facilitate the re-fixing of the interrupted GNSS ambiguity. Multiple GNSS can also be used to shorten the PPP convergence time. We compare the contribution of multi-GNSS and the INS to the ambiguity re-fixing during GNSS outage. Results show that the multi-GNSS, e.g., Galileo, GLONASS and BDS, without ambiguity resolution has little contribution to the re-fixing of GPS ambiguity in PPP/INS, while INS can provide highly accurate positioning results during the GNSS outages. The higher the accuracy of the predicted INS positioning, the lower the contribution of multi-GNSS to the re-fixing of the ambiguity in the PPP/INS. The finding is verified by a theoretical analysis, carborne experiment and shipborne experiment. Experiment results show that the re-fixing time is 43 s for GPS PPP and MEMS-grade INS coupled system in GNSS outage of 1 s. The re-fixing time of GPS is slightly changed when adding the multi-GNSS, e.g., Galileo, GLONASS and BDS, without the ambiguity resolution. However, by performing ambiguity resolution to the added GNSS system, the re-fixing time of PPP/INS is significantly reduced from 43 to 4 s. The reason is that, although the multi-GNSS provides little improvement on the accuracy of the ambiguity, it enlarges the number of the ambiguity parameter. The possibility of ambiguity resolution is increased due to the large candidate set of the ambiguity, which reduces re-fixing time.
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Data Availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the IGS-MGEX and GFZ for providing the GNSS data and products. This work was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants Nos. 42074014, 41604013 and 41904039).
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Du, Z., Chai, H., Xiao, G. et al. Analyzing the contributions of multi-GNSS and INS to the PPP-AR outage re-fixing. GPS Solut 25, 81 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-021-01121-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-021-01121-2