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Development of a Low-Cost Solution for GPS/Gyro Attitude Determination

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 Development of a Low-Cost Solution for GPS/Gyro
Attitude Determination
Chaochao Wang and Gérard Lachapelle
Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary
BIOGRAPHY
Chaochao Wang finished his MSc. degree in Department
of Geomatics Engineering at University of Calgary in
June 2003. He obtained his BSc. degree in Geodesy from
Wuhan Technical University of Surveying and Mapping
in 2000. His research topic at the University of Calgary
was GPS-based low cost solutions for attitude
determination. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the
Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering at the
University of New Brunswick.
Professor Gérard Lachapelle holds a CRC/iCORE Chair
in Wireless Location in the Department of Geomatics
Engineering. He has been involved with GPS
developments and applications since 1980 and has
authored/co-authored numerous related publications and
software. More information is available at
http://plan.geomatics.ucalgary.ca.
ABSTRACT
The use of low cost GPS receivers for attitude
determination can significantly reduce the overall cost of
a hardware system. However, compared to the use of high
performance GPS hardware, the carrier phase
measurements from low cost sensors are subject to
additional carrier phase measurement errors, such as
multipath, antenna phase center variation and noise.
These error sources, together with cycle slip occurrences,
severely deteriorate the accuracy and reliability of attitude
estimation using low cost GPS receivers.
To overcome the limitation of standalone GPS attitude
determination systems, an integration solution using low
cost GPS receivers and rate gyros is investigated in this
paper. By employing this dead reckoning aiding sensor
type, the ambiguity search region can be specifically
defined as a small cube based on the continuous attitude
and inter-antenna configuration information. An extended
centralized Kalman filter is implemented to fuse the rate
gyro data with GPS carrier phase measurements. The
Proceedings of NTM 2004 Conference (Session A2), San Diego, CA, January 26-28, 2004, The Institute of Navigation
quality control system based on innovation sequences is
used in the Kalman filter to identify cycle slip
occurrences and incorrect antenna vector solutions.
Availability also improves as compared to a GPS stand-
alone system as the attitude parameters can be estimated
using angular rate measurements from rate gyros during
GPS outages.
The hardware used to design and test the integrated
system consists of CMC Allstar receivers with OEM
AT575-70 antennas and Murata ENV-05D-52
piezoelectric vibrating rate gyroscopes. The performance
of the GPS/rate Gyro system was first examined in static
mode and further tested under real field kinematic
conditions. High performance GPS receivers, namely
NovAtel Beeline units were also tested to investigate the
advantages of gyro integration with different receiver
grades in a kinematic environment.
INTRODUCTION
GPS-based attitude determination techniques have been
extensively investigated in the last ten years and proven to
be a cost effective solution without errors drifting over
time (e.g. Cohen 1992, Lu 1994). However, most past
work has been done using high performance GPS
receivers and antennas so as to mitigate carrier phase
measurement errors and further improve the accuracy and
reliability of attitude determination systems. In recent
years, as low cost GPS receivers that can output good
quality time-synchronized carrier phase measurements
appeared on the market, some research has been carried
out to investigate the feasibility of using this grade of low
cost GPS hardware for attitude determination so that the
overall cost of attitude solution could be reduced to
several hundreds of dollars [Hoyle et al 2002, Gebre-
Egziabher et al, 1998].
GPS carrier phase measurement errors, such as multipath,
antenna phase center offsets and receiver noise from low
cost GPS receivers and antennas have a more significant
impact on performance due to the hardware limitations.
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Previous research [Hoyle et al 2002, Wang & Lachapelle
2002] has shown that, even though the low cost Allstar
sensors can be used for attitude determination, the
performance of such a low cost system highly depends on
the multipath environment and platform dynamics. In
cases with strong multipath and large antenna phase
centre variations, it takes a long time to solve the carrier
phase integer ambiguities or even wrong ambiguities may
be identified during the search process, which inevitably
leads to large erroneous attitude component estimates.
In order to improve the performance of low-cost attitude
determination system, three piezoelectric rate gyros,
namely Murata ENV-05D-52 Gyrostar units, are used
herein as sensors to monitor the angular rates around the
three axes in the body frame. These automotive rate gyros
are selected for their low cost (about $15 per unit in large
quantities) and the competitive performance relative to
other MEMS gyro sensors with similar prices. The
angular rate measurements are fused with the GPS
antenna vector components to estimate the attitude
parameters as well as their angular rates in a Kalman filter.
The improvement resulting from employing these low
cost rate gyros can be classified into three categories,
namely accuracy, availability and reliability. The
integration methodologies are realized in a high
performance, open architecture attitude determination
software, namely HEADRT+TM [e.g. Hoyle et al 2002].
The performance of the integrated system is examined
both under static and kinematic conditions.
ATTITUDE DETERMINATION USING GPS
GPS sensors in an attitude system are primarily used to
determine the inter-antenna vectors as well as the
approximate positions of the platform in the navigation
frame. Regardless of the platform dynamics, the relative
positions of the antennas in the body frame remain fixed
and can be accurately measured a priori. The attitude of
the platform, which is the rotation of the body frame with
respect to the local level frame, can then be precisely
estimated once if the coordinates of the antennas in the
local level frame have been correctly estimated by the
GPS measurements. The three Euler attitude angles in the
rotation matrix can be obtained using the follow equation:
⎛ xb ⎞ ⎛ x ll ⎞
⎜ b⎟ ⎜ ⎟
⎜ y ⎟ = Rllb (ψ ,θ , ϕ )⎜ y ll ⎟ (1)
⎜ zb ⎟ ⎜ z ll ⎟
⎝ ⎠ ⎝ ⎠
where
ψ,θ,ϕ denote the heading, pitch and roll
Proceedings of NTM 2004 Conference (Session A2), San Diego, CA, January 26-28, 2004, The Institute of Navigation
x, y, z are the cartesian coordinates of antenna vector,
superscript b represents the body frame
superscript ll stands for the local level frame.
In this research, an open-architecture attitude
determination software developed at the University of
Calgary, namely HEADRT+TM, is used as the base for
algorithm development. The attitude estimation in
HEADRT+TM is carried out in two phases: The first phase
determines the correct double difference carrier phase
ambiguities for the antenna vector(s). After coordinate
transformation from WGS-84 into the local level frame,
the attitude parameters are estimated from the quasi-
observable vector components in the second phase.
HEADRT+TM uses the Least Squares Ambiguity Search
Technique (LSAST) (Hatch 1991) to determine the
double difference carrier phase ambiguities. Firstly, the
location of the master antenna is determined from a
standard single point position. Since no attitude
information is known a priori, the ambiguity search
region is defined as a sphere with the origin as the
primary antenna location and the radius of the inter-
antenna distance. Therefore, the potential position of the
secondary antenna should fall on the shell of this sphere
regardless of the orientation of inter-antenna vectors.
After forming all the double difference ambiguities
combinations that fall in the sphere, some statistical tests
based on double difference residuals and the inter-antenna
length check are used to identify the correct ambiguity set
(Hoyle et al 2002).
Once the inter-antenna vector ambiguities are fixed, the 3-
D vector components are transformed from WGS-84 to
the local level frame. The three Euler attitude parameters
are calculated using an implicit least squares estimation to
allow for the epoch-by-epoch assessment of attitude
estimates under any dynamics. Kalman filter estimation
has also been implemented in the software. The filter is
especially effective when the platform dynamic is
predictable relative to the carrier phase measurement rate.
PERFORMANCE OF LOW-COST GPS SYSTEM
After the double differencing process, the clock errors
(both satellite and receiver clocks) have been virtually
cancelled out. The remaining error sources in the double
difference carrier phase observables are multipath,
antenna phase centre variations, cycle slips as well as
receiver noise. Because the differentiation between
multipath and antenna phase centre effects is difficult to
achieve under field conditions, we generally merge them
together and define them as the antenna effect. Compared
with the high-performance systems, low cost systems are
vulnerable to these error sources. Figure 1 shows the
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epoch-by-epoch rms double difference residuals using
different grades of antennas with CMC Allstar receivers.
During four consecutive days, a different antenna pair
was placed in the same location in order to experience the
same multipath environment and satellite geometry.
Therefore, the difference in the residuals is caused by the
antenna effect and receiver noise. The AT-575-104
antenna is a very low-cost passive antenna and usually
used in the vehicle navigation. The large rms residuals
and their low frequency variation indicate that the carrier
phase measurements are severely plagued by multipath
and phase centre variations. Similarly, another type of
vehicular low cost active antenna, namely the AT-575-70,
has a limited ability to mitigate the antenna effect, which
caused the rms residuals to be above 5 mm. Compared
with the first two vehicular usage antenna, the AT-575-68
model is designed for marine applications, has better
performance. However, the low frequency variation is
still visible in the time series. The NovAtel 600 antenna
is a high performance antenna with a very good phase
centre stability and a well-shaped gain pattern to reject
satellite signals with low elevation angles. It can be seen
that the rms residuals have small magnitude and noise-
like behavior, which indicates the antenna effect is much
lower.
Figure 1: Double difference rms carrier phase
residuals – Static Mode
Cycle slip is another significant error source in the carrier
phase based application when a low cost system is
employed. This is especially the case in high dynamic
conditions. Unfortunately, attitude determination belongs
to this kind of high kinematic applications. The tracking
loops in low cost GPS receivers are more sensitive to the
dynamics than that in high performance units. With the
increase of dynamics, the receiver noise which includes
thermal noise in tracking loops and dynamic stress on
local oscillators, increases accordingly. In certain extreme
conditions, the tracking loop may produce small integer
carrier cycles and leads to cycle slips. Figure 2 shows the
double difference phase observables using low cost CMC
Proceedings of NTM 2004 Conference (Session A2), San Diego, CA, January 26-28, 2004, The Institute of Navigation
units in a kinematic test which will be explained at length
in the following section. The discrete jumps with a
magnitude of 0.1m seems to be caused by a half cycle slip.
Figure 2: Double difference rms carrier phase
residuals – Kinematics Mode
This kind of small cycle slips severely deteriorates the
performance of cycle slip detection in an attitude
determination system. Usually, the phase prediction and
the residual check method are used for cycle slip
detection when the single frequency is available. However,
severe multipath and phase centre variation effects can
produce the same error on the double difference
observables as well. Selecting feasible thresholds to
isolate the cycle slips from the combined effect of
antennas and receiver noise in the double difference
observables is nearly impossible. If the false alarm is
given by the detection functions, it will be very difficult
to instantaneously solve the correct ambiguity set in this
type of environment. It is crucial to implement some
integration theme to augment the cycle slip detection
scheme as well as the ambiguity resolution in the low cost
attitude determination system.
INTEGRATION METHODOLOGY
In order to overcome the limitations of low cost GPS-
standalone attitude systems, the rate gyros are integrated
with the GPS attitude system. Using three orthogonally-
placed gyroscopes, the angular rates of the body platform
can be continuously measured. As the rate gyros can only
provide the relative angular rotation rate measurements,
the initial absolute orientation of the platform has to be
calculated from carrier phase measurements when GPS is
available. Afterwards, when the GPS antenna vector
solution is not available, the rotation of the platform since
the last GPS outage can be estimated by integrating the
attitude rates over the appropriate time interval. Figure 3
depicts the integration scheme. After data synchronization,
the antenna vector components are estimated in the local
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level frame, provided the double difference ambiguities
are correctly determined. Then the antenna vector
solutions from GPS are fused with the rate gyro
measurements in a Kalman filter to estimate the attitude
parameters as well as attitude rates and gyro biases. If the
carrier phase ambiguities are not fixed to integer values,
the search process has first to be completed in order to
determine the true ambiguity set for the antenna vectors
before attitude estimation. If the ambiguities cannot be
correctly determined for the current epoch, the attitude
angles and their angular rates are estimated from angular
rate data only.
Figure 3: Attitude estimation procedure
Using the rate gyros, the attitude parameters are
continuously obtainable during the navigation process.
This a priori known attitude information can be used in
the ambiguity search process to specify the search space
as a small cube near the secondary antenna instead of the
entire sphere, as shown in Figure 4. The use of external
attitude information will significantly improve the
reliability of the ambiguity resolution since the smaller
search region makes the ambiguity identification process
much easier. This is especially true when low cost GPS
sensors are used because the carrier phase measurements
from such units are noisier than those from high
performance GPS receivers. The gyro-aided ambiguity
resolution scheme is very powerful as it can largely
reduce the candidate ambiguities compared to the sphere
region definition. For an inter-antenna vector of 1 m, the
number of L1 ambiguity combinations that fall within the
sphere is about 1400. The number decreases to less than
Proceedings of NTM 2004 Conference (Session A2), San Diego, CA, January 26-28, 2004, The Institute of Navigation
20 using the cube definition with a side of 20 cm. With
such a small number of candidate combinations, the
integer ambiguities could be successfully determined in
less than 1 s in a static test.
Zb
Primary Ant
Yb
Secondary Ant 1
Secondary Ant 2
Xb
Figure 4: Cube ambiguity search region
HARDWARE
The GPS units used in this research are CMC Allstar,
inexpensive L1 receivers with 12 independent tracking
channels. They can output time-synchronized carrier
phase measurements with a data rate up to 10 Hz through
a serial port at the baud rate of 9600. The standard
antenna used is the OEM low cost AT575-70 antenna,
which is an active antenna with a diameter of 5 cm. As
discussed in Wang & Lachapelle (2002), the attitude
estimation performance using these low cost GPS units
depends on platform dynamics. A separate test research
showed that low cost antennas that are heavily plagued by
phase centre variations and multipath may lead to double
differenced carrier phase measurement errors of up to 7
cm (after the least square adjustment).
The Murata ENV-05D-52 piezoelectric vibrating
gyroscope (GyrostarTM), as shown in Figure 5, is designed
for the coarse direction detection in vehicular navigation
and its performance is fairly satisfactory compared to
other low cost MEMS gyro sensors in the same price
range. The measured angular rate is outputted in the form
of voltages with a sampling rate of 2K Hz through an A/D
converter.
This MEMS gyro suffers from bias and scale factor
instabilities, as well as high frequency noise. Previous
research (e.g., Stephen 2000, Hayward et al 1997) has
shown that the magnitude of the first two error sources is
related to the external temperature. The gyro bias drifts
over time due to self-heating in the hardware and the
variations can be as large as 20 %. In this work, the biases
are estimated and updated online in the filter when GPS
4/10
measurements are available. During GPS outages, the bias rotation matrix with respect to the state vector in Equation
estimates remain fixed and are used to compensate their 1:
effects on angular rate output. Compared to the gyro bias,
the scale factor is not so sensitive to temperature and the ∂R
values are very close to 22 mV°/s within a range of 30 H = (3)
degrees. For this reason, the scale factor can be
3 n×9 gps ∂X
determined once and used for the entire navigation
mission, since the temperature does not change greatly in where n is the number of antenna vectors that have been
several hours. The high frequency noise in the angular solved by GPS carrier phase measurements.
velocity data can be easily suppressed when averaging the
high frequency gyro data to 10 Hz. The gyro has also The relation between the rate gyro measurements, the
shown limited endurance to shock and vibration. In three Euler angles and the gyro biases is given by
vehicular attitude determination mode, the vibration of the
platform varies significantly depending on the engine ⎛ ω z ⎞ ⎛ c(ϕ )c(θ ) − s (θ ) 0 ⎞ ⎛ψ& ⎞ ⎛ δω z ⎞
velocity, temperature and many other factors (Stephen ⎜ ⎟ ⎜ ⎟ ⎜ ⎟ ⎜ ⎟
2000). It is very hard to develop a valid model to ⎜ ω x ⎟ = ⎜ s (ϕ )c(θ ) c(ϕ ) 0 ⎟ ⋅ ⎜ θ& ⎟ + ⎜ δω x ⎟ (4)
compensate for the angular rate measurement errors ⎜ ω ⎟ ⎜ − s (θ ) 1 ⎟⎠ ⎜⎝ ϕ& ⎟⎠ ⎜⎝ δω y ⎟⎠
caused by the vibration of the platform. ⎝ y⎠ ⎝ 0

where s () , c () denote sine and cosine, respectively.

In the prediction process, a random walk model is used to

predict the angular rates and gyro biases in the Kalman
filter. Therefore, the transition matrix φ can be expressed
as

⎛1 0 0 dt 0 0 0 0⎞ 0
⎜ ⎟
⎜0 1 0 0 dt 0 0 0 0 ⎟
⎜0 0 1 0 0 dt 0 0 0 ⎟
⎜ ⎟ (5)
Figure 5: Murata rate gyro ⎜0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0⎟
φ = ⎜⎜ 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 ⎟⎟
⎜0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0⎟
INTEGRATION ALGORITHM ⎜ ⎟
⎜0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0⎟
⎜0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0⎟
⎜⎜ ⎟
0 0 0 0 1 ⎟⎠
The data fusion for the GPS/gyro integrated attitude
⎝0 0 0 0
system has been realized in an extended centralized
Kalman filter. The advantages of using the centralized
Kalman filter instead of the de-centralized one are the The Q matrix, which represents the process noise in the
tight data fusion and the better error detection. As Kalman filter, can be written as
mentioned above, after determining the double difference
⎛ σ ψ2& 3 σ ψ2& ⎞
ambiguities and the inter-antenna vector, the observables ⎜ dt 0 0 dt 2 0 0 0 0 0 ⎟
⎜ 3 2 ⎟ (6)
from GPS are the 3D antenna vector components in the ⎜ σ θ2& σ θ2& ⎟
⎜ 0 0 ⎟
3 2
dt 0 0 dt 0 0 0
local level frame. The measurements from the rate gyros ⎜ 3 2 ⎟
⎜ σ ϕ2& σ ϕ2& ⎟
are the angular rates around the three axes in the body ⎜ 0 0 dt 3
0 0 dt 2
0 0 0 ⎟
3 2
frame ( ω x , ω y , ω z ). The state vector consists of three
⎜ 2 ⎟
⎜ σ ψ& dt 2 0 0 σ 2
0 0 0 0 0 ⎟
Q=⎜ 2 ψ&
⎟
gyro biases, three Euler attitude parameters and their ⎜ σ θ2& ⎟
⎜ 0 dt 2 0 0 σ θ2& 0 0 0 0 ⎟
angular rates: ⎜ 2 ⎟
⎜ σ ϕ2& ⎟
⎜ 0 0 dt 2 0 0 σ ϕ2& 0 0 0 ⎟
⎜ 2 ⎟
X=ψ ( θ ϕ ψ& θ& ϕ& δω z δω x δω y )
T
(2) ⎜ 0
⎜ 0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
σ w2
0
x
0
σ w2
0 ⎟
0 ⎟
⎜ y
⎟
⎜ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 σ w2 z ⎟⎠
⎝
The design matrix for the GPS vector component
observables consists of the partial derivatives of the

Proceedings of NTM 2004 Conference (Session A2), San Diego, CA, January 26-28, 2004, The Institute of Navigation 5/10
The numerical value of the angular rate variance ( δ rate )
2
in Equation 6 depends on the tightness of the dynamic
constraint in the Kalman filter and the variance of the
gyro bias estimate represents the stability of the bias drift.
A quality control system based on innovation sequences,
which has been successfully implemented in the unaided
GPS attitude determination system (Wang & Lachapelle
2002), is also employed in the filtering process for
GPS/gyro integration. With the introduction of angular
rate measurements from rate gyros in the Kalman filter, a
more robust estimation of the attitude rates can be
obtained, which eventually improves the sensitivity of
error detection in the quality control system.
During GPS outages, no antenna vector solutions are
available and the attitude parameters are determined by
integrating the attitude rates over the time interval. The
attitude rates are estimated directly from the gyro data
after compensating for the gyro biases using the following
equation:
⎛ s (ϕ ) c(ϕ ) ⎞
⎛ψ& ⎞ ⎜ 0 c(θ )
⎟
c(θ ) ⎟⎛⎜ ω y − δω y ⎞⎟
⎜ ⎟ ⎜
⎜ θ& ⎟ = ⎜ 0 c(ϕ ) − s (ϕ ) ⎟⎜ ω x − δω x ⎟ (7)
⎜ ϕ& ⎟ 1 s (ϕ )t (θ ) c(ϕ )t (θ ) ⎟⎜ ω − δω ⎟
⎜
⎝ ⎠ ⎜ ⎟⎝ z z ⎠
⎝ ⎠
where t () denotes the tangent
From the last equation, one can see that the estimation of
attitude rates is related not only to the rate gyro
measurements, but with the gyro bias and attitude
parameter estimation as well.
STATIC TEST
sensors was processed with a modified version of
HEADRT+TM.
The attitude results from the Kalman filter using GPS data
only are shown in Figure 6 and the corresponding
statistics are listed in Table 1. The attitude parameter
estimates contain low frequency fluctuations, which are
due to the impact of multipath and antenna phase centre
variations. The Kalman filter process could not entirely
remove the high noise level in the attitude estimates, as
the short inter-antenna distances did not dilute the
receiver noise effect on attitude estimates.
Then the measurements from the rate gyros were
integrated with the GPS data with a modified Kalman
filter. During the process, it was found that the gyro bias
estimates were not stable due to the high noise level in the
angular rate measurements even after gyro data
resampling. A smoothing process with a window length
of 20 s was introduced to suppress noise effects on these
estimates since the gyro bias drifts smoothly over time.
As low cost rate gyros have good accuracy over very
short intervals, the use of gyro measurements can
significantly decrease the noisy behavior of the attitude
estimates. As a result, the estimated attitude component
noise level, shown in Figure 7, is significantly smaller
than those of Figure 6. However, as the rate gyros can
only sense the angular rates and the integrated attitude
errors from gyro data only grow rapidly with time, the
absolute attitude parameters are primarily derived from
GPS. From the attitude statistics shown in Table 2, it has
been found that the low frequency variations due to
multipath and phase center variations cannot be removed
using rate gyro aiding, as was anticipated. This is why the
standard deviations given in Table 2 are as large as those
given in Table 1.

In order to examine the performance of the integrated

system, a static test was carried out on the roof of
Engineering Building, University of Calgary. The system
was set up using three CMC Allstar receivers. Three
OEM AT575-70 GPS antennas were deployed in a
rectangle in the horizontal plane with inter-antenna
distances of 0.8 and 0.6 m, respectively. Three Murata
ENV-05D-52 Gyrostar were assembled orthogonally in a
box to sense the angular rates of the platform in the body
frame. As the outputs from the rate gyros are voltage
pulses, they were digitized in an A/D converter and
synchronized with GPS time, provided temporarily by an
external receiver in this case. The 2K Hz digital angular
rate data from the rate gyros were then averaged into 10
Hz for data synchronization and noise suppression. The
test lasted 45 minutes and all the data from GPS/gyro Figure 6: Standalone GPS attitude estimates - Static
test

Proceedings of NTM 2004 Conference (Session A2), San Diego, CA, January 26-28, 2004, The Institute of Navigation 6/10
Table 1: Standalone GPS attitude estimate statistics - filter. The three estimated gyro biases closely coincide
Static test (Degrees) with the true values.
Heading Pitch Roll
Mean 268.60 1.08 2.68
St. Dev. 0.19 0.53 1.37

Figure 8: Gyro bias estimation

In order to examine the coasting capability of the rate
gyros when no GPS solutions are available, five GPS
outages with lengths ranging from 20 to 60 s were
simulated. During these outages, the attitude parameters
Figure 7: Integrated GPS-Rate gyro system attitude
were directly estimated using the angular rate
estimates - Static test
measurements from the rate gyros. Compared to the
Table 2: Integrated GPS-Rate gyro system attitude attitude results from the integrated system, the differences
estimate statistics - Static test (Degrees) shown in Figure 9, which are indicative of the estimated
errors due to the gyro free runs, are within one degree
Heading Pitch Roll over 60 s for heading and pitch. The roll differences are
Mean 268.60 1.08 2.67 slightly large and grow to more than two degrees in the
St. Dev. 0.17 0.43 1.32 one 60-s outage. The accuracy of gyro bias estimates, as
The integrated system attitude rate estimates have a good well as the length of the outages affects the coasting
random noise behavior (Table 3) and their magnitudes performance. In this test, the roll difference for the first
range within 0.2 deg/s, which indicates that the 60-s outage (2nd gap in Figure 9) is larger than the attitude
parameters in the Kalman filter were appropriately drift in the second 60-s outage (5th gap), which indicates
selected. The non-zero estimates of attitude rates are that the gyro bias estimate in the 5th gap is somehow
mainly caused by noise in both GPS and gyro better than that during the 2nd gap.
measurements.
Table 3: Integrated system attitude rate estimate
statistics in (Deg/s)
Heading Rate Pitch Rate Roll Rate
Mean 0.00 -0.01 0.00
RMS 0.03 0.04 0.04

The precise estimation of gyro biases is imperative in this

integration scheme as the performance of gyro coasting
during GPS outages relies on their estimates. As the
platform is kept stationary during this static test, the
variations of voltage output were solely due to the drift of
the gyro biases and the measurement noise. In Figure 8,
the blue lines represent the variation patterns of the actual
gyro biases contaminated with noise, while the red lines
represent the corresponding estimates from the Kalman Figure 9: Attitude errors during gyro coasting

Proceedings of NTM 2004 Conference (Session A2), San Diego, CA, January 26-28, 2004, The Institute of Navigation 7/10

KINEMATIC TEST
After examining the performance of the system in static
mode, a road kinematic test was conducted to investigate
its performance. In order to achieve measurement
redundancy for the GPS attitude estimation, a fourth GPS
unit was added to the system. The baseline lengths for the
three inter-antenna vectors were 0.6, 0.8 and 1.0 m,
respectively. A medium-performance GPS/INS system,
namely the NovAtel BlackDiamond™, was used with the
SAINTTM (Satellite and Inertial Navigation Technology)
software (Petovello 2003) during the test to provide
independent and accurate reference, as shown in Figure
10. The standard deviations of the BlackDiamond™/
SAINTTM derived attitude estimates were always within 3
arcmins during the test. A high performance GPS multi-
antenna attitude system consisting of NovAtel Beeline™
receivers and 501 antennas was also used for further
comparisons using different GPS receiver grades. The
antenna and inertial equipment setup on the 2001 Dodge
Grand Caravan test vehicle is shown in Figure 11. The
misalignment between the body frames of the GPS and
inertial attitude systems was of the order of 1 to 2 degrees.
During the 16-minute test run, the average velocity of the
vehicle was 70-90 km/hr, which introduced some
vibration and jerk on the platform.
Figure 10: Attitude reference outputs - Kinematic test
Figure 11: Antenna setup - Kinematic test
Proceedings of NTM 2004 Conference (Session A2), San Diego, CA, January 26-28, 2004, The Institute of Navigation
Due to the lack of precise alignment of the various
instruments during the hardware installation process, the
different attitude platforms were not perfectly parallel.
The small misalignment angles have to be precisely
determined prior to the comparison of the estimated
attitude results from each system. The misalignment
angles were estimated using the technique described by
Wang (2003).
During the data processing phase, the carrier phase
measurements from the Beeline™ units were found quite
good and the true double differenced ambiguities were
solved instantaneously at the start of the test. No cycle
slip was detected and the integer ambiguities for the three
antenna vectors were correctly fixed during the entire test
run. When the estimated attitude parameters are compared
with the reference results, the attitude estimation errors
and their statistics are shown in Figure 12 and Table 4,
respectively. The rms for heading is 0.42 degrees and the
corresponding values for pitch and roll are 0.68 and 0.85
degrees, respectively. Taking the short inter-antenna
distances into account, these rms values are satisfactory.
As may be expected, the carrier phase measurements
using the low cost CMC receivers and AT575-70
antennas are affected by multipath and antenna phase
centre variations as well as cycle slips. The double
difference residuals reached 7-8 cm even though the
integer ambiguities were correctly determined. This kind
of noisy carrier phase measurements not only results in
poor attitude parameter estimation accuracy, but also
leads to difficulties in ambiguity resolution and cycle slip
detection. Currently a residual check is used in
HeadRT+TM to identify the correct ambiguity set as well
as to detect small cycle slips (0.5 or 1 cycle). Large
carrier phase measurement errors due to antenna phase
center effects and multipath make this check too sensitive
if the tolerance selected is as small as that used for the
Beeline™ system. However, choosing a higher threshold
for the residual check is very risky as it may lead to
wrong ambiguity combinations passing through the
ambiguity distinguishing process. In this test, the above
criterion was optimistic in order to reject any incorrect
ambiguity set since the rate gyros can ensure availability
when GPS solutions are not available. As a result of
choosing a small tolerance, the fixed double difference
ambiguities were frequently identified as erroneous and
the ambiguity resolution restarted very often for the large
double difference phase residuals. Even though false
alarms may be caused, it does not affect the attitude
estimation performance provided the correct double
difference ambiguities can be resolved again
instantaneously. However, when the sphere search
volume was used for the ambiguity resolution process, the
entire process took 10-20 s to determine the integer
ambiguity sets, 20 % of which were identified as
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erroneous by the quality control system. Compared to the
sphere volume method, the cube search region definition
significantly reduced the search volume and the number
of candidate ambiguities, which resulted in faster and
reliable ambiguity resolution. In this test, the integer
ambiguities could be correctly selected in less than 1 s for
91% of the cases using the cube search method.
Figure 12: Differences between BlackDiamond™ and
Beeline™ attitude parameters - Kinematic test
Table 4: Difference statistics between
BlackDiamond™ and Beeline™ attitude parameters -
Kinematic test (Degrees)
Heading Pitch Roll
Mean -0.01 -0.01 0.00
RMS 0.42 0.68 0.85
Max (abs) 1.15 2.53 3.98
Figure 13 shows the attitude parameters estimated using
the integrated CMC Allstar units and rate gyros.
Compared to the attitude results obtained with the high-
end Beeline™ units, performance is much lower, as
anticipated. Using phase measurements from low cost
CMC Allstar sensors, GPS is not always available as 88.4
% of the attitude solutions are estimated from GPS/gyro
measurements and the other 11.6% are obtained from rate
gyro measurements only. The low availability of GPS is
caused by the large carrier phase measurement errors,
such as multipath, antenna phase centre offsets and
receiver noise and the tight threshold used for the residual
test. The longest coasting period using gyro data only is
12.9 s, which leads to a 2-degree error in each attitude
component. The gyro coasting capability degrades
compared with the performance in static test because the
low cost gyros suffer from the vibration, jerk and other
dynamic effects introduced by platform motion.
Proceedings of NTM 2004 Conference (Session A2), San Diego, CA, January 26-28, 2004, The Institute of Navigation
Figure 13: Integrated system attitude estimates -
Kinematic test using Allstar units
The differences between the attitude estimates from the
low cost integrated system and the
BlackDiamond™/SAINT™ results are shown in Figure
14 and the corresponding statistics are listed in Table 5.
Due to the coordinate misalignment between the two
attitude systems, the attitude differences are biased. The
standard deviations are unbiased however and are 0.73,
1.46 and 1.74 degrees for heading, pitch and roll,
respectively. Even though most of the attitude errors are
within a two-sigma limit, the maximum heading, pitch
and roll differences reach 3.38, 5.50 and 7.26 degrees,
respectively. These large errors are mainly due to the
carrier phase measurement errors introduced by multipath,
antenna phase variations and increased receiver noise in
high dynamics. Cycle slips can be successfully identified
using the phase prediction method, residual check as well
as the innovation sequences since the dramatic change in
residuals or vector solutions due to cycle slips is easily
detected by the above methods. However, the quality
control system based on innovation sequences is
insensitive to the low frequency antenna phase centre
variations and mulitpath. Using a smaller tolerance in the
residual check may have an impact on rejecting GPS
antenna vector solutions that are contaminated by strong
multipath and large antenna phase centre offsets in
attitude estimation, but the lower availability of GPS
solutions leads to larger errors in the attitude parameters
as the rate gyro errors grow quickly without GPS update.
Table 5: Difference statistics between
BlackDiamond™ and CMC Allstar/rate gyro attitude
parameters - Kinematic test (Degrees)
Heading Pitch Roll
Mean -0.04 0.03 -0.01
RMS 0.73 1.46 1.74
Max 3.38 5.50 7.26
9/10

Figure 14: Differences between BlackDiamond™ and
CMC Allstar/rate gyro attitude parameters -
Kinematic test
CONCLUSIONS
Reliability and availability problems degrade the
performance of attitude determination when low cost GPS
sensors are employed in kinematic conditions. The
addition of low cost gyroscope is effective to improve
system performance. In this work, three low costs rate
gyros were integrated with low cost GPS receivers. The
introduction of these rate gyros not only effectively
decreased the noise level in the estimated attitude
parameters and coasted the attitude output during GPS
outages, but also improved the system reliability.
However, the test also showed that the low frequency
antenna phase centre variations and multipath still have a
severe impact on carrier phase measurements and restrict
the accuracy performance of the system. In order to
significantly improve performance, the following
approaches may be worth investigating:
• The phase centre variations of low cost antennas
could be calibrated in order to mitigate their
effect on accuracy performance.
• The use of better GPS antennas to mitigate the
multipath and antenna phase centre variations
would significantly improve performance.
• Higher performance rate gyros for the GPS/gyro
integration could be integrated in the system to
improve coasting capability during extended
GPS outages.
Together with hardware improvement and understanding
of its performance, some adaptive algorithms could also
implemented to mitigate the impact of low frequency
carrier phase measurement errors. This method is
Proceedings of NTM 2004 Conference (Session A2), San Diego, CA, January 26-28, 2004, The Institute of Navigation
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especially useful when the platform dynamics is
predictable.
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