Robust GNSS Multi-receiver Direct Position Estimation for High-dynamic Aerial Applications

To mitigate the robustness challenges (e.g. multipath, masking) posed to legacy GPS receiver architectures, prior work has proposed Direct Position Estimation (DPE), a new, robust GPS receiver architecture that preserves information redundancy by directly estimating the navigation solution in the position domain, skipping intermediate ranging measurements altogether. This paper proposes multi-receiver Direct Position Estimation (MR-DPE), a novel GPS receiver architecture that operates multiple DPE receivers over fixed antenna baselines as a receiver network. This network aggregates the measurements taken at individual receivers to form a unified position-velocity-time (PVT) solution. MR-DPE further expands DPE’s robustness through the measurement and geometric redundancies resulting from the multi-receiver architecture. We implement MR-DPE on a software-defined radio and conducted full-scale flight experiments. We installed four GPS L1 active antennas on a high-dynamic fixed-wing aircraft and explored a wide range of flight profiles, especially those under significant signal multipath and masking effects. The flight test has validated the superior robustness performance of MR-DPE.