High-Precision Positioning Using Plane-Constrained RTK Method in Urban Environments

High-precision positioning methods have drawn great attention in recent years due to the rapid development of smart vehicles as well as automatics driving technology. The Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) technique is a mature tool to achieve centimeter-level positioning accuracy in open-sky areas. However, the users who drive under dense urban conditions are always confronted with harsh global navigation satellite system (GNSS) environments. Skyscrapers and overpasses block the signals and reduce the number of visible satellites, making it difficult to achieve continuous and precise positioning. Considering that the road is relatively smooth in most urban areas, vehicles are expected to travel on the same plane when they are close to each other. The road plane information is a promising candidate to enhance the performance of the RTK method in constrained environments. In this paper, we propose a plane-constrained RTK (PCRTK) method using the positioning information from cooperative vehicles. In a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) network, the positions of cooperative vehicles are used to fit a road plane for the target vehicle. The parameters of the plane fitting are treated as new measurements to enhance the performance of the float estimator. The relationship between the plane parameters and the state of the estimator is derived in our study. To validate the performance of the proposed method, several experiments with a four-vehicle fleet were carried out in open-sky areas and dense urban areas in Beijing, China. Simulations and experimental results show that the proposed method can take advantage of the plane constraint and obtain more accurate positioning results compared to the traditional RTK method.