Flight-Test Evaluation of Integer Ambiguity Resolution Enabled PPP

Abstract

The technology of integer ambiguity resolution-enabled precise-point-positioning (also referred to as PPP-AR) has been proven capable of providing comparable accuracy, efficiency, and productivity to long-baseline real-time kinematic positioning (RTK) during the last decade. Commercial PPP-AR services have been provided by different institutions and companies and have been widely used in geodetic missions. However, the usage and research of the PPP-AR mostly concentrated on nonaviation applications, e.g., vehicle navigation, surveying, and mapping, and monitoring crustal motions. Few of them focused on fixing the ambiguities during an aircraft flight. In this contribution, we implemented the PPP-AR technique for the first time in an airplane flight test to investigate how much the fixed ambiguities could contribute to airplane positioning solutions in challenging circumstances, including high velocity and severe maneuvers. We first looked into the influences of the tropospheric delay on the positioning and ambiguity solutions because the height of the airplane may dramatically change within a narrow time span, and thus, a proper constraint of this parameter was crucial for the computation of the tropospheric effects. Then, how to fix the ambiguities successfully and reliably in challenging circumstances was discussed. Finally, the airplane data was processed in 15 and 1s intervals with ambiguity float and fixed solutions under different configurations to illustrate in which condition and to what extent the fixed ambiguities can improve the airplane positioning accuracy.