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Positioning and Navigation in Remote Sensing

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A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2021) | Viewed by 17486

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Prof. Dr. Ahmed El-Mowafy

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Chief Guest Editor

School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University, Bentley, WA 6102, Australia
Interests: positioning and navigation using GNSS; precise point positioning; integration of GNSS with other sensors; integrity monitoring and quality control; estimation theory
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Amir Khodabandeh

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Guest Editor

Department of Infrastructure Engineering, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia
Interests: estimation theory; GNSS precise positioning; GNSS quality control
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Kan Wang

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Guest Editor

1. National Time Service Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an 710600, China
2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
3. School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University, Bentley, WA 6102, Australia
Interests: high-precision GNSS positioning and navigation; LEO POD and clock determination; integrity monitoring; SBAS; PPP-RTK
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Today, the presence of multiple global navigation satellite systems facilitates their extensive use in a wide range of vital applications, from aviation, road, maritime and rail transport, and pedestrian navigation to surveying, space weather monitoring, monitoring earth and ocean changes, remote sensing, and deformation analysis. GNSS has become an essential system in these applications, and new applications are rapidly emerging. These applications require the development of new algorithms, new frameworks for processing, inclusion of augmentation data, and implementation of quality control and integrity monitoring methods that ensure trustworthy positioning and navigation. Experimentation is necessary to validate the use of these methods. In this Special Issue, we are looking for articles that describe the new methods and their testing, or experimentation of existing methods on new applications, showcasing the potential, advantages or limitations of using GNSS in the above applications. The range of applications considered is wide, but advanced ambiguity resolution and PPP are the main areas of interest. We will also consider approaches that can enhance existing methods by providing correction and integrity services, such as land- or satellite-based augmentation systems. Moreover, since positioning is denied or degraded in challenging GNSS environments, such as urban areas, despite being of high interest to vital applications such as transport, we are interested in the integration of GNSS with other sensors, such as inertial measurement units, lidars, and cameras.

Prof. Dr. Ahmed El-Mowafy
Dr. Amir Khodabandeh
Dr. Kan Wang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

positioning and navigation
GNSS
remote sensing
precise positioning
PPP
integrity monitoring
ambiguity resolution
deformation monitoring
earth observation

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

26 pages, 7972 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A New Cycle-Slip Repair Method for Dual-Frequency BDS Against the Disturbances of Severe Ionospheric Variations and Pseudoranges with Large Errors

by Dehai Li, Yaming Dang, Yunbin Yuan and Jinzhong Mi

Remote Sens. 2021, 13(5), 1037; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13051037 - 09 Mar 2021

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 1799

Abstract

Many Beidou navigation satellite system (BDS) receivers or boards provide dual-frequency measurements to conduct precise positioning and navigation for low-power consumption. Cycle-slip processing is a primary work to guarantee consistent, precise positioning with the phase data. However, the cycle-slip processing of BDS dual-frequency phases still follows with those of existing GPS methods. For single-satellite data, cycle-slip detection (CSD) with the geometry-free phase (GF) is disturbed by severe ionospheric delay variations, while CSD or cycle-slip repair (CSR) with the Melbourne–Wubbena combination (MW) must face the risk of the tremendous disturbance from large pseudorange errors. To overcome the above limitations, a new cycle-slip repair method for BDS dual-frequency phases (BDCSR) is proposed: (1) An optimal model to minimize the variance of the cycle-slip calculation was established to the dual-frequency BDS, after correcting the ionospheric variation with a reasonable and feasible way. (2) Under the BDS dual-frequency condition, a discrimination function was built to exclude the adverse disturbance from the pseudorange errors on the CSR, according to the rankings of the absolute epoch-difference GFs calculated by the searched cycle-slip candidates after correcting the ionospheric variation. Subsequently, many compared CSR tests were implemented in conditions of low and medium elevations during strong geomagnetic storms. Comparisons from the results of different methods show that: (1) The variations of ionospheric delays are intolerable in the cycle-slip calculation during the geomagnetic storm, and the tremendous influence from the ionospheric variation should be corrected before calculating the cycle-slip combination with the BDS dual-frequency data. (2) Under the condition of real dual-frequency BDS data during the geomagnetic storm, the actual success rate of the conventional dual-frequency CSR (CDCSR) by employing the optimized combinations, but absenting from the discrimination function, is lower than that of BDCSR by about 2%; The actual success rate of the CSD with MW (MWCSD), is lower than that of BDCSR by about 2%. (3) After adding gross errors of 0.7 m to all real epoch-difference pseudoranges epoch-by-epoch, results of CDCSR and MWCSD showed many errors. However, BDCSR achieved a higher actual success rate than those of CDCSR and MWCSD, about 43% and 16%, respectively, and better performance of refraining the disturbance of large pseudorange error on the cycle-slip determination was achieved in the BDCSR methodology. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Positioning and Navigation in Remote Sensing)

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16 pages, 5040 KiB

Open AccessArticle

High-Accuracy Real-Time Kinematic Positioning with Multiple Rover Receivers Sharing Common Clock

by Lin Zhao, Jiachang Jiang, Liang Li, Chun Jia and Jianhua Cheng

Remote Sens. 2021, 13(4), 823; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13040823 - 23 Feb 2021

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1901

Abstract

Since the traditional real-time kinematic positioning method is limited by the reduced satellite visibility from the deprived navigational environments, we, therefore, propose an improved RTK method with multiple rover receivers sharing a common clock. The proposed method can enhance observational redundancy by blending the observations from each rover receiver together so that the model strength will be improved. Integer ambiguity resolution of the proposed method is challenged in the presence of several inter-receiver biases (IRB). The IRB including inter-receiver code bias (IRCB) and inter-receiver phase bias (IRPB) is calibrated by the pre-estimation method because of their temporal stability. Multiple BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) dual-frequency datasets are collected to test the proposed method. The experimental results have shown that the IRCB and IRPB under the common clock mode are sufficiently stable for the ambiguity resolution. Compared with the traditional method, the ambiguity resolution success rate and positioning accuracy of the proposed method can be improved by 19.5% and 46.4% in the restricted satellite visibility environments. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Positioning and Navigation in Remote Sensing)

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12 pages, 3579 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Continuity Enhancement Method for Real-Time PPP Based on Zero-Baseline Constraint of Multi-Receiver

by Fuxin Yang, Chuanlei Zheng, Hui Li, Liang Li, Jie Zhang and Lin Zhao

Remote Sens. 2021, 13(4), 605; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13040605 - 08 Feb 2021

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1819

Abstract

Continuity is one of the metrics that characterize the required navigation performance of global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based applications. Data outage due to receiver failure is one of the reasons for continuity loss. Although a multi-receiver configuration can maintain position solutions in case a receiver has data outage, the initialization of the receiver will also cause continuous high-precision positioning performance loss. To maintain continuous high-precision positioning performance of real-time precise point positioning (RT-PPP), we proposed a continuity enhancement method for RT-PPP based on zero-baseline constraint of multi-receiver. On the one hand, the mean time to repair (MTTR) of the multi-receiver configuration is improved to maintain continuous position solutions. On the other hand, the zero-baseline constraint of multi-receiver including between-satellite single-differenced (BSSD) ambiguities, zenith troposphere wet delay (ZWD), and their suitable stochastic models are constructed to achieve instantaneous initialization of back-up receiver. Through static and kinematic experiments based on real data, the effectiveness and robustness of proposed method are evaluated comprehensively. The experiment results show that the relationship including BSSD ambiguities and ZWD between receivers can be determined reliably based on zero-baseline constraint, and the instantaneous initialization can be achieved without high-precision positioning continuity loss in the multi-receiver RT-PPP processing. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Positioning and Navigation in Remote Sensing)

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20 pages, 4402 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Improved Cycle Slip Repair with GPS Triple-Frequency Measurements by Minifying the Influences of Ionospheric Variation and Pseudorange Errors

by Dehai Li, Yamin Dang, Yunbin Yuan and Jinzhong Mi

Remote Sens. 2021, 13(4), 556; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13040556 - 04 Feb 2021

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1962

Abstract

In advance of precise positioning with phase data, cycle slip detection (CSD) is a basic work that should be implemented in phase data possessing. When the cycle slip occurred, cycle slip repair (CSR) can be taken to rebuild the continuity of phase data. Unfortunately, the large pseudorange errors can contaminate the combinations with the pseudoranges and phases such as the Hatch–Melbourne–Wubbena combination (HMW) and cause false CSD or wrong CSR results. On the other hand, the severe ionospheric time variation can deteriorate the epoch-difference geometry-free phase (GF), and tremendously interfere with the performances of CSD and CSR. To handle the aforementioned limitations, a global position system (GPS) triple-frequency CSR method (GTCSR) is proposed with two efficient treatments: (1) the significant ionospheric variations are corrected, and the influences from the residual ionospheric effects are minimized along with the observational noises; and (2) the impacts of large pseudorange errors are refrained by designing a discrimination function with a geometry-free and ionosphere-free phase to identify the correct cycle slip values. Consequently, CSR tests were conducted with three monitoring stations at different regions. First, during a strong geomagnetic storm, without correcting the ionospheric variation of CSR (WICSR) displayed obvious failures, and many epochs of cycle slip values from WICSR deviated from the known values. However, the results of the GTCSR were correct, and GTCSR presented a higher success rate than that of WICSR. Furthermore, for the real triple-frequency data, by adding gross errors of 2.5 m on all epoch-difference pseudoranges epoch by epoch, the conventional triple-frequency CSR with the optimized combinations (CTCSR) and the CSD with HMW (HMWCSD) showed many mistakes, where the results of CTCSR and HMWCSD on numerous epochs were inconsistent with the actual situations, but the success rate of GTCSR was significantly higher than those of CTCSR and HMWCSD. In summary, in the condition of the cutoff elevation being larger than 10 degrees, improved performances and higher success rates were achieved from GTCSR under environments of large pseudorange errors and severe ionospheric variations. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Positioning and Navigation in Remote Sensing)

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25 pages, 14750 KiB

Open AccessArticle

LiDAR/RISS/GNSS Dynamic Integration for Land Vehicle Robust Positioning in Challenging GNSS Environments

by Ahmed Aboutaleb, Amr S. El-Wakeel, Haidy Elghamrawy and Aboelmagd Noureldin

Remote Sens. 2020, 12(14), 2323; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12142323 - 19 Jul 2020

Cited by 20 | Viewed by 4789

Abstract

The autonomous vehicles (AV) industry has a growing demand for reliable, continuous, and accurate positioning information to ensure safe traffic and for other various applications. Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers have been widely used for this purpose. However, GNSS positioning accuracy deteriorates drastically in challenging environments such as urban environments and downtown cores. Therefore, inertial sensors are widely deployed inside the land vehicle for various purposes, including the integration with GNSS receivers to provide positioning information that can bridge potential GNSS failures. However, in dense urban areas and downtown cores where GNSS receivers may incur prolonged outages, the integrated positioning solution may become prone to severe drift resulting in substantial position errors. Therefore, it is becoming necessary to include other sensors and systems that can be available in future land vehicles to be integrated with both the GNSS receivers and inertial sensors to enhance the positioning performance in such challenging environments. This work aims to design and examine the performance of a multi-sensor system that fuses the GNSS receiver data with not only the three-dimensional reduced inertial sensor system (3D-RISS), but also with the three-dimensional point cloud of onboard light detection and ranging (LiDAR) system. In this paper, a comprehensive LiDAR processing and odometry method is developed to provide a continuous and reliable positioning solution. In addition, a multi-sensor Extended Kalman filtering (EKF)-based fusion is developed to integrate the LiDAR positioning information with both GNSS and 3D-RISS and utilize the LiDAR updates to limit the drift in the positioning solution, even in challenging or ultimately denied GNSS environment. The performance of the proposed positioning solution is examined using several road test trajectories in both Kingston and Toronto downtown areas involving different vehicle dynamics and driving scenarios. The proposed solution provided a performance improvement over the standalone inertial solution by 64%. Over a GNSS outage of 10 min and 2 km distance traveled, our solution achieved position errors less than 2% of the distance travelled. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Positioning and Navigation in Remote Sensing)

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21 pages, 16295 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Sensitivity Study of POD Using Dual-Frequency GPS for CubeSats Data Limitation and Resources

by Kan Wang, Amir Allahvirdi-Zadeh, Ahmed El-Mowafy and Jason N. Gross

Remote Sens. 2020, 12(13), 2107; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12132107 - 01 Jul 2020

Cited by 18 | Viewed by 3714

Abstract

Making use of dual-frequency (DF) global navigation satellite system (GNSS) observations and good dynamic models, the precise orbit determination (POD) for the satellites on low earth orbits has been intensively investigated in the last decades and has achieved an accuracy of centimeters. With the rapidly increasing number of the CubeSat missions in recent years, the POD of CubeSats were also attempted with combined dynamic models and GNSS DF observations. While comprehensive dynamic models are allowed to be used in the postprocessing mode, strong constraints on the data completeness, continuity, and restricted resources due to the power and size limits of CubeSats still hamper the high-accuracy POD. An analysis of these constraints and their impact on the achievable orbital accuracy thus needs to be considered in the planning phase. In this study, with the focus put on the use of DF GNSS data in postprocessing CubeSat POD, a detailed sensitivity analysis of the orbital accuracy was performed w.r.t. the data continuity, completeness, observation sampling interval, latency requirements, availability of the attitude information, and arc length. It is found that the overlapping of several constraints often causes a relatively large degradation in the orbital accuracy, especially when one of the constraints is related to a low duty-cycle of, e.g., below 40% of time. Assuming that the GNSS data is properly tracked except for the assumed constraints, and using the International GNSS Service (IGS) final products or products from the IGS real-time service, the 3D orbital accuracy for arcs of 6 h to 24 h should generally be within or around 1 dm, provided that the limitation on data is not too severe, i.e., with a duty-cycle not lower than 40% and an observation sampling interval not larger than 60 s. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Positioning and Navigation in Remote Sensing)

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