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Smartphone RTK positioning with multi-frequency and multi-constellation raw observations: GPS L1/L5, Galileo E1/E5a, BDS B1I/B1C/B2a

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Abstract

In the field of mass-market location-based services, smartphones have become the mainstream terminals by their ubiquity, portability, and low cost. The release of GNSS raw observations in Android smart devices and the popularity of low-cost dual-frequency GNSS chipsets have greatly inspired the research on high-precision positioning for smartphones. In this contribution, we give the quality investigation results of the smartphone B1C and B2a observations of BDS-3 new signals for the first time and study in detail the characteristics of multi-frequency and multi-constellation smartphone raw observations in both static and kinematic situations. The results show that the accuracy of pseudorange and carrier phase in the L5 band is 2–5 times and 2 times higher than that in the L1 band, especially in kinematic situations. A multi-GNSS RTK positioning method for smartphones suitable for real kinematic conditions is proposed, and two specialized improvement strategies are given, including a comprehensive data quality control strategy combing prior and post-detection, and an improved method for constraining RTK float solutions in the position domain. Finally, multiple sets of experiments under different motion conditions and observation environments are carried out. In the playground, urban expressway, and urban main road tests, the DF-RTK position accuracy is at centimeter level, decimeter level, and 1-m level, respectively, and the ambiguity fixing rates are 87.1%, 55.9%, and 2.6%, respectively. Meanwhile, the SF-RTK positioning has a certain degree of decline for each performance indicator. It is demonstrated that smartphones have a great potential to achieve high-precision navigation and positioning in real urban environments.

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Data availability

All data of this study are available from the authors for academic purposes on request.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Wuhan Science and Technology Project (Grant No. 2020010601012185), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 42104021 and 42274034), and the Open Fund of Hubei Luojia Laboratory (Grant No. 2201000038). We like to appreciate the Huawei team for the engineering prototype of the Mate40 smartphone, and also appreciate the Google team for their open-source application named “GnssLogger”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan, 430079, Hubei, China

    Xianlu Tao, Wanke Liu, Yingzhe Wang, Lan Li, Feng Zhu & Xiaohong Zhang

  2. Hubei Luojia Laboratory, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan, 430079, Hubei, China

    Wanke Liu & Xiaohong Zhang

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  1. Xianlu Tao
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  2. Wanke Liu
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  3. Yingzhe Wang
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  4. Lan Li
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  5. Feng Zhu
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  6. Xiaohong Zhang
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Contributions

XLT and WKL provided the initial idea and designed the experiments for this study; XLT, WKL, YZW, and LL analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript; FZ and XHZ helped with the result discussions and writing. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wanke Liu.

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Tao, X., Liu, W., Wang, Y. et al. Smartphone RTK positioning with multi-frequency and multi-constellation raw observations: GPS L1/L5, Galileo E1/E5a, BDS B1I/B1C/B2a. J Geod 97, 43 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-023-01731-3

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