Evaluation of RTK Methods for Moving Vehicles and Practical Recommendations

Abstract

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) based precise positioning using Real Time Kinematic (RTK) technique has been proposed as an enabler of the formation operation of moving vehicles. In RTK methods, the integer ambiguity of GNSS carrier phase measurements must be resolved. Although there have been many proposed algorithms for the integer ambiguity resolution, the widelane combination of carrier phase measurements and LAMBDA methods have gained the most popularity in literatures when dual frequency GNSS measurements were used. In this paper, we evaluated five alternative methods to determine relative positions of moving base and rover receivers; the round-off scheme of widelane carrier phase, instant least-squares and Kalman filter-based LAMBDA with widelane carrier phase, instant least-squares and Kalman filter-based LAMBDA with dual frequency measurements. The paper presented the performance of each method using flight test data, which showed their strength and weakness in the aspects of time-to-first-fix, ambiguity resolution success ratio, and relative position errors. Based on that, we provided practical recommendations of RTK operations for moving vehicles.