Nowadays machine control applications such as precision agriculture, construction (land and offshore), and open mining, increasingly rely on global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). In all these applications, GNSS is the preferred technology thanks to its global availability and easiness to deploy and operate. The most important requirements in all high precision machine control applications are:
Achieving centimeter accuracy requires, on the one hand, high bandwidth multi-frequency GNSS receivers and, on the other hand, carrier phase-based positioning technologies such as differential Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) or real-time Precise Point Positioning (PPP). Besides, availability requirements demand for multi-constellation receivers supporting GPS, Galileo and modernized Glonass. Further, the need of determining attitude or heading calls for multi-antenna receiver configurations such that the attitude can be derived from the determination of the baseline vector between pairs of antennas based on RTK. Finally, in order to ensure above mentioned centimeter accuracy and high availability even in harsh environments high sensitivity with robustness to radio frequency interference (RFI) and multipath (e.g. in the forest under foliage, in canyons for open mining) is to be achieved.
In the project ADVANSYS an advanced multi-antenna receiver with adaptive beamforming capabilities integrated with a combined inertial navigation system (INS) and RTK unit is developed for machine control applications. The system shall meet the requirements as mentioned above and thus has to achieve the following technical goals:
Furthermore, the development solution shall be:
The project is targeting to develop a system that fits for a serial product.
Support: European Commission (EC)
Consortium: Septentrio, Institute for Communications and Navigation of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Satimo, and University of Nottingham.
Duration: 2011-2013