Android Raw GNSS Measurement Datasets for Precise Positioning

Raw GNSS measurement APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) in the Android system are a bridge between the advances of positioning techniques and the applications of positioning for billions of Android users in the mass market. The publication trend since the debut of these APIs in 2016 has shown an increasing attention from both academia and industry. Among all GNSS topics, high precision positioning on smartphones may be the most attractive one, not just because it spawns over 1/3 of publications, but more importantly, it may trigger a plethora of possible novel applications, such as lane-level driving, mapping, and precise augmented reality. To facilitate this process, in this paper, Google releases 60+ datasets collected from phones in the Android GPS team, together with corrections from SwiftNavigation Inc. and Verizon Inc. These datasets were collected on highways in the US San Francisco Bay Area in the summer of 2020. They will be released at g.co/gnsstools by November 2020. Ground truth files collected by a NovAtel SPAN system will also be provided in NMEA file format. Furthermore, Google also provides the source codes in Matlab to evaluate the positioning performance. This paper provides details of these datasets, corrections, ground truth files, and utilities.