UAV Integrity Monitoring Measure Improvement using Terrestrial Signals of Opportunity

Mahdi Maaref and Zaher M. Kassas

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	A method for improving the integrity monitoring measure of Global Positioning System (GPS) by exploiting terrestrial signals of opportunity (SOPs) is developed. The proposed method considers a receiver mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which makes pseudorange observations on GPS satellites and terrestrial SOPs. First, SOP pseudorange measurement errors are characterized from an extensive data collected with a UAV in different environments: open sky, semi-urban, and urban. Next, the vertical protection level (VPL) reduction by exploiting terrestrial SOPs is studied. It is demonstrated that adding terrestrial SOP measurements, which are inherently at low elevation angles is more effective to reduce VPL over adding GPS measurements. Experimental results to evaluate the developed method are presented for a UAV navigating in an urban environment over a trajectory of 823 m, while collecting GPS signals and cellular real long-term evolution (LTE) SOPs. It is demonstrated that the proposed method reduces the VPL by 57.76% from the VPL of GPS-only.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 32nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2019) September 16 - 20, 2019 Hyatt Regency Miami Miami, Florida
Pages:	3045 - 3056
Cite this article:	Maaref, Mahdi, Kassas, Zaher M., "UAV Integrity Monitoring Measure Improvement using Terrestrial Signals of Opportunity," Proceedings of the 32nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2019), Miami, Florida, September 2019, pp. 3045-3056. https://doi.org/10.33012/2019.17009
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