Improved Outdoor Target Tracking via EKF-based GNSS/UWB Tight Integration with Online Time Synchronisation

Oliviero Vouch, Yihan Guo, Simone Zocca, Alex Minetto, Fabio Dovis

Peer Reviewed

Abstract: Accurate and robust positioning technology in the mass-market segment is pivotal to support a number of critical Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) applications. State-of-the-art Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers design has been increasingly targeting flexible, embedded architectures integrating low-cost sensors to overcome GNSS limitations. The widespread proliferation of Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) technology, which enables centimeter-level accurate ranging in cluttered environments, is an appealing candidate for tight hybridisation with GNSS. When dealing with data streams from different Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) sensors, it is known that temporal misalignment is of concern, and accurate state-estimation via centralised, recursive filtering architectures can be undermined. As a first contribution, this work theoretically analyses the accuracy impact of asynchronous data association in the framework of a tightly integrated GNSS/UWB system leveraging plain Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) integration. Then, it puts forward a novel EKF-based model implementing online time offset estimation and compensation (i.e., time calibration) for GNSS/UWB tight integration. Results obtained in a multi-agent, cooperative scenario demonstrate that the proposed hybridisation methodology can achieve horizontal and vertical positioning accuracy gains of 33.95 % and 59.33 % , respectively, in Root-Mean-Square Error (RMSE) terms.
Published in: Proceedings of the 35th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2022)
September 19 - 23, 2022
Hyatt Regency Denver
Denver, Colorado
Pages: 2409 - 2422
Cite this article: Vouch, Oliviero, Guo, Yihan, Zocca, Simone, Minetto, Alex, Dovis, Fabio, "Improved Outdoor Target Tracking via EKF-based GNSS/UWB Tight Integration with Online Time Synchronisation," Proceedings of the 35th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2022), Denver, Colorado, September 2022, pp. 2409-2422. https://doi.org/10.33012/2022.18387
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