Remote Sensing, Vol. 8, Pages 553: Application of Helmert Variance Component Based Adaptive Kalman Filter in Multi-GNSS PPP/INS Tightly Coupled Integration (Remote Sensing)

The integration of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the Inertial Navigation System (INS) based on Real-time Kinematic (RTK) and Single Point Positioning (SPP) technology have been applied as a powerful approach in kinematic positioning and attitude determination. However, the accuracy of RTK and SPP based GPS/INS integration mode will degrade visibly along with the increasing user-base distance and the quality of pseudo-range. In order to overcome such weaknesses, the tightly coupled integration between GPS Precise Point Positioning (PPP) and INS was proposed recently. Because of the rapid development of the multi-constellation Global Navigation Satellite System (multi-GNSS), we introduce the multi-GNSS into the tightly coupled integration of PPP and INS in this paper. Meanwhile, in order to weaken the impacts of the GNSS observations with low quality and the inaccurate state model on the performance of the multi-GNSS PPP/INS tightly coupled integration, the Helmert variance component estimation based adaptive Kalman filter is employed in the algorithm implementation. Finally, a set of vehicle-borne GPS + BeiDou + GLONASS and Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS) INS data is analyzed to evaluate the performance of such algorithm. The statistics indicate that the performance of the multi-GNSS PPP/INS tightly coupled integration can be enhanced significantly in terms of both position accuracy and convergence time.