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Reliability control of single-epoch RTK ambiguity resolution

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Abstract

Reliability is an important indicator of GNSS performance, especially for the safety-critical applications. Carrier phase-based GNSS positioning can achieve high precision, but its reliability depends on the ambiguity resolution reliability. The ambiguity acceptance test is a popular way to improve the reliability of ambiguity resolution, although the popular ratio test with empirical threshold is not capable of controlling the reliability. A fixed failure rate (FF) approach has been proposed to solve this problem from a theoretical prospective, but its performance has not been verified with real GNSS data. In this study, the threshold function method is used to calculate the FF-difference test threshold; its performance in single-epoch RTK situation is evaluated with two GPS data sets. The numerical results indicate that the threshold function can control the failure rate of ambiguity resolution according to the user requirements. The ratio test also performs well, but it obtains different failure rates for different baselines using a particular empirical threshold. The FF-difference test outperforms the ratio test in the short-baseline case since the inaccurate variance factor degrades its performance. The performance of the FF-difference test can be improved if a better stochastic model is applied.

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Acknowledgments

This research is financially supported by the Australia cooperative research center for spatial information (CRC-SI) project 1.01 ‘new carrier phase processing strategies for achieving precise and reliable multi-satellite, multi-frequency GNSS/RNSS positioning in Australia.’ GNSS data used in this research are freely downloaded from NGS FTP server. The author would also like to appreciate two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia

    Lei Wang & Yanming Feng

  2. School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Lei Wang & Jiming Guo

Authors
  1. Lei Wang
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  2. Yanming Feng
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  3. Jiming Guo
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Correspondence to Lei Wang.

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Wang, L., Feng, Y. & Guo, J. Reliability control of single-epoch RTK ambiguity resolution. GPS Solut 21, 591–604 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-016-0550-0

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