Multi-Receiver Direct Position Estimation Tested on a Full-Scale Fixed-Wing Aircraft

Arthur Hsi-Ping Chu and Grace Xingxin Gao

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	In an environment surrounded by obstacles, such as a mountain valley, legacy GPS receiver architectures often experience degraded accuracy due to dense multipath and/or signal masking. To mitigate challenging effects, we propose Multi-Receiver Direct Position Estimation (MR-DPE). MR-DPE is based on existing works in Direct Position Estimation (DPE), which estimates the navigation solution in the position domain directly. This approach provides deep inter-channel couplings and information redundancy. In MR-DPE, multiple DPE receivers are organized into a receiver network with fixed antenna baselines. A unified position-velocity-time (PVT) solution is then synthesized by aggregating the measurements taken at the individual receivers. The robustness of MR-DPE is threefold: the measurement and the geometric redundancies originated from the multi-receiver framework, as well as the intrinsic robustness inherited from the individual DPE receivers. We implemented MR-DPE on our PyGNSS software-defined radio platform. The MR-DPE architecture was validated through a series of full-scale flight tests. We demonstrated the improved robustness of MR-DPE against multipath and terrain masking.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 30th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2017) September 25 - 29, 2017 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon
Pages:	3761 - 3766
Cite this article:	Chu, Arthur Hsi-Ping, Gao, Grace Xingxin, "Multi-Receiver Direct Position Estimation Tested on a Full-Scale Fixed-Wing Aircraft," Proceedings of the 30th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2017), Portland, Oregon, September 2017, pp. 3761-3766. https://doi.org/10.33012/2017.15230
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