Nonlinear and Robust Location for Low-cost Shipborne Laser Ranging Positioning

ABSTRACT

Without landing on islands, reefs, or facilities, fast locating targets by the reflectorless ranging integrated with Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) has a wide range of application. We propose a nonlinear robust location method and modify current nonlinear estimators for achieving shipborne laser ranging positioning of high precision. The Newton method is recommended as a nonlinear estimator for shipborne ranging positioning since the Gauss–Newton method occasionally fails in critical cases when the control points and the unknown point are approximately coplanar. However, it shows that the vertical positioning based on the shipborne laser ranging is generally of low precision, while the vertical angle measurement is used to further remedy this deficiency. The positioning precision and reliability might be significantly decreased with the increased number of gross errors in the observations that are dynamically implemented on a moving shipborne platform; thus a weighting scheme with high breakdown point is recommended to set the preliminary weights, and then Scheme III of the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics of China (IGGIII) is applied to iteratively updating the weights of distance observations. It shows that the proposed method based on the angle-distance observational data fusion can be used to achieve a three-dimensional positioning of high precision.

KEYWORDS:

• Gauss–Newton method
• Newton method
• nonlinear least squares
• positioning
• reflectorless ranging
• robust estimation

Funding

This work is partly supported by National High-tech R&D Program (grant no. 2009AA121405, 2012BAB16B01), National Science Foundation of China (41674014, 41104018, and 41474011).