3d vision aided gnss real-time kinematic positioning for autonomous systems in urban canyons

Abstract

In estimating a position of a vehicle utilizing a global navigation satellite system (GNSS), it is desirable to exclude outliner GNSS measurements due to navigation signals via non-light-of-sight paths from the GNSS to the vehicle, but it leads to a distorted satellite geometry distribution. Complementariness between low-lying visual landmarks and healthy but high-elevation satellite measurements is explored to improve the geometry constraint. Measurements of an inertial measurement unit, low-lying visual landmarks captured by a forward-looking camera onboard the vehicle, and healthy but high-elevation satellite measurements are tightly-coupled integrated via sliding window optimization of system states used in a factor graph. To improve estimation performance, good initial guesses of system states are important. As such, initial guesses of velocity set and position set inside a sliding window are estimated simultaneously based on data of Doppler measurement, double-differenced (DD) pseudorange measurement and DD carrier-phase measurement as obtained in GNSS measurements.