The Realization and Evaluation of PPP Ambiguity Resolution with INS Aiding in Marine Survey

Abstract

The tightly coupled global navigation satellite system (GNSS) precise point positioning (PPP) and inertial navigation system (INS) can provide high-precision position, velocity and attitude information. The coupled system utilizes single receiver, which is particularly suitable for the environment without reference station, such as marine survey. In the former works, the integer ambiguity resolution of PPP/INS in terrestrial environment is researched. However, the GNSS observation is severely affected by the multipath effect in marine environment. In addition, the sideslip caused by wind and sea wave also impact float ambiguity estimation, consequently introducing difficulty for PPP ambiguity fixing. Therefore, the PPP/INS tightly coupled model with fixed ambiguity is proposed for marine survey. The correction model of INS gyroscope bias in closed-loop is deduced in detail. The influence of ship motion noise and multipath in marine environment is reduced by introducing the robust factor to the Kalman filter. The feasibility of the method is verified in a real marine experiment, with a detail evaluation of the data quality and positioning accuracy. The results show that the accuracy of PPP/INS can reach centimeter level after fixing the ambiguity in marine environment. Furthermore, the precise INS-predicted position can significantly shorten the re-fixed time of PPP/INS, which proves the efficiency of the proposed approach.

Keywords:

• Fractional cycle bias
• PPP ambiguity resolution
• PPP/INS integration
• marine survey
• robust Kalman filter

Acknowledgement

The authors thank IGS-MGEX and GFZ for providing GNSS data and products.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants Nos. 42074014, 41604013, and 41904039).