A novel method for low-cost MIMU aiding GNSS attitude determination

Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are well suited for attitude determination. In most cases, the success rate of the initialization is always a difficult problem, especially the single-frequency measurement model of the double-difference carrier phase. The main reason for this is excessively large noise error that arises in the measurement of the double-difference carrier phase. When the geometric relations of the equations are not good, the difference between the residual error of the optimal solution and that of the suboptimal solution is not very obvious. In this study, we design a smoothing model based on MEMS. The noise error of the measurement of the double-difference carrier phase is suppressed and smoothed via this model. It is designed to reduce the initialization time and improve the success rate of the solution. In addition, we propose a new method based on the rotation matrix to resolve the attitude angle. This method produces a better performance in reducing computation time and selecting satellites. The condition of the baseline length is combined with the ambiguity function method (AFM) to search for integer ambiguity, and this method is validated in reducing the span of candidates. The experiment is conducted in a selected campus, and the performance is proved to be effective. Our results are based on simulated and real-time GNSS data and are applied on single-frequency processing, which is known as one of the challenging cases of GNSS attitude determination.