Snapshot Positioning in Multi-Antenna Systems for Inland Water Applications

Abstract

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are increasingly used as the main source of Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) information for inland water navigation. Therefore, it becomes of crucial importance to ensure reliability and accuracy of the GNSS-based navigation solution for challenging inland waterway environments like locks or bridges where effects such as multipath and non-line-of-sight can occur. This work extends the single-antenna snapshot positioning solver to a multi-antenna snapshot positioning and orientation solver. In constrast to a single position calculation for each individual antenna, this combined approach allows position and orientation calculation even in the case that each antenna has less than four observations and therefore helping with the aforementioned effects. Furthermore, different weighting options for the satellite signals are considered. The presented schemes are evaluated using real measurement data from an inland water scenario with multiple bridges and a waterway lock. With regard to single-antenna algorithms the initial results are encouraging and clearly indicate the advantage of the combined position and orientation calculation with multiple GNSS antennas.