Low-Cost GNSS Receivers for Radiometric Surveying: an Experimental Assessment

Daniele Borio, Francesco Raiola, Ciro Gioia, Vladan Štefula, Philippe Hubert

Abstract:	In the proximity of a nuclear site, large portions of soils may be contaminated by radioactive material: such sections of soil should be precisely identified and removed as part of the decommissioning process. In this respect, accurate location information is a fundamental requirement for the operations involved in the decommissioning of nuclear sites. This paper investigates the potential of low-cost global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers for radiometric surveying including recent mass-market GNSS receivers and Android smartphones providing raw measurements. For the analysis, a cart was instrumented to hold a radioisotope identifier device (RIID) and the different GNSS receivers. Several data collections were performed in different environments including open-sky and obstructed propagation conditions. In particular, a real nuclear site consisting of several buildings and storage structures was considered: in this way obstructed propagation conditions were obtained. From the experiments performed, it emerged that recent low-cost devices outperform the GPS receiver embedded in the radiometric sensor. Despite this fact, trajectories estimated by the Android devices do not seem suitable for the generation of radiometric maps, most of all under the challenging conditions of a nuclear site. On the contrary, modern low-cost mass-market receivers are able to achieve sub-meter accuracies, which are required for radiometric surveying. Repeating of the same trajectory several times helps the identification of biases. Moreover, multiple measurement runs can be combined to obtain median trajectories and improve the final surveying result.
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:	889 - 907
Cite this article:	Borio, Daniele, Raiola, Francesco, Gioia, Ciro, Štefula, Vladan, Hubert, Philippe, "Low-Cost GNSS Receivers for Radiometric Surveying: an Experimental Assessment," Proceedings of the 35th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2022), Denver, Colorado, September 2022, pp. 889-907. https://doi.org/10.33012/2022.18526
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