Performance Assessment of BDS-3 PPP-B2b/INS Loosely Coupled Integration

• Published in: Remote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 14; no. 13; p. 2957
• Main Authors: Xu, Xiaofei, Nie, Zhixi, Wang, Zhenjie, Wang, Boyang, Du, Qinghuai
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01-07-2022
• Subjects: Accuracy; BeiDou Navigation Satellite System; Bias; Communication; Global navigation satellite system; GNSS; Inertial navigation; INS; Integration; Internet; Ionosphere; Kinematics; loosely coupled integration; Mechanization; Microelectromechanical systems; Navigation systems; Occlusion; Orbits; Outages; Performance assessment; Performance evaluation; PPP-B2b service; Real time; Remote sensing; Satellite navigation systems; Satellites; Urban environments; Velocity
• ISSN: 2072-4292; 2072-4292
• DOI: 10.3390/rs14132957

The BeiDou global navigation satellite system (BDS-3) has been officially providing a real-time precise point positioning (PPP) augmentation service, known as the PPP-B2b service, since 2020. Decimeter-level positioning accuracy is expected to be achieved based on the PPP-B2b service. It shows great potential for global navigation satellite system (GNSS) real-time applications, including, for example, vehicle positioning on land. However, the application of the PPP-B2b service is still full of challenges in the urban environment because of GNSS signal blockage. The inertial navigation system (INS) is a popular technology which can provide continuous positions under GNSS challenging scenarios. In this study, we constructed a BDS-3 PPP-B2b/INS loosely coupled integration system for vehicle positioning and evaluated its performance through two automotive experiments. In the first experiment, four periods of 30 s GNSS outages were simulated to evaluate the performance of PPP-B2b/INS loosely coupled integration during GNSS outages. During the simulated GNSS outages, PPP-B2b positioning did not work. Nevertheless, PPP-B2b/INS loosely coupled integration provided continues solution through INS mechanization. The averaged positioning errors at the last epoch of outages were 300.6/498.0/41.0 cm for PPP-B2b/MEMS-IMU and 18.6/21.8/6.1 cm for PPP-B2b/Tactical-IMU loosely coupled integration, in the east, north and up directions, respectively. In the second experiment, we drove the land vehicle in a complex urban environment for 15 min. During this period, two GNSS signal interruptions occurred due to the occlusion of bridges, lasting 15 s and 5 s, respectively. The results show that the improvement of positioning accuracy in the east, north, and up components were 64.1%, 77.8%, and 73.8% respectively for PPP-B2b/MEMS-IMU loosely coupled integration, and 63.9%, 79.5%, and 74.4% respectively for PPP-B2b/Tactical-IMU loosely coupled integration, as compared to the positioning accuracy of PPP-B2b only.