Adaptive Kalman filter based on integer ambiguity validation in moving base RTK

In high-precision dynamic positioning, it is necessary to ensure the positioning accuracy and reliability of the navigation system, especially for safety–critical applications, such as intelligent vehicle navigation. In the face of a complex observation environment, when the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) uses carrier phase observations for high-precision relative positioning, ambiguity resolution will be affected, and it is difficult to estimate all ambiguities. In addition, when the GNSS signal quality and measurement noise level are difficult to predict in an environment with many occlusions, the received satellite observations are prone to very large errors, resulting in apparent deviations in the positioning solution. However, traditional positioning algorithms assume that the measurement noise is constant, which is unrealistic. This will cause incorrect ambiguity resolution, lead to meter-level positioning errors, reduce the reliability of the system, and increase the integrity risk of the system. We proposed an innovative adaptive Kalman filter based on integer ambiguity validation (IAVAKF) to improve the efficiency of ambiguity resolution (AR) and positioning accuracy. The partial ambiguity resolution (PAR) method is applied to solve the integer ambiguities. Then, the accuracy of the fixed ambiguity is verified by the ambiguity success rate. Taking the ambiguity success rate as a dynamic adjustment factor, the measurement noise matrix and variance–covariance matrix of the state estimation is adaptively adjusted at each time interval in the Kalman filter to provide a smoothing effect for filtering. The optimal Kalman filter gain matrix is obtained to improve positioning accuracy and reliability. As a result, the static and dynamic vehicle experiments show that the positioning accuracy of the proposed IAVAKF is improved by 26% compared with the KF. Through the IAVAKF, a more realistic PL can be obtained and applied to evaluate the integrity of the navigation system in the position domain. It can reduce the false alarm rate by 2.45% and 1.85% in the horizontal and vertical directions, respectively.