Feasibility analysis of the performance of low-cost GNSS receivers in monitoring dynamic motion

• DOI: 10.1016/j.measurement.2022.111819
• Publication Date: 2022-08-28T11:27:09Z
• Authors: Chenyu Xue; Panos A. Psimoulis; Xiaolin Meng
• Keywords: Applied Mathematics; 02 engineering and technology; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Condensed Matter Physics; Instrumentation; 01 natural sciences; 0201 civil engineering; 0105 earth and related environmental sciences

The development of low-cost GNSS receivers broadens their applications, such as deformation monitoring, which have been performed routinely by survey-grade GNSS receivers. To evaluate the performance of low-cost GNSS receivers, we assessed the precision of low-cost multi-GNSS receivers in monitoring dynamic motion and developed methods of using a closely-spaced dual low-cost GNSS receivers’ system to enhance their performance. In this study, both the survey-grade and low-cost GNSS receiver/antennas were mounted on a circular rotating device executing controlled periodic rotation. It was shown that the precision of the low-cost GNSS receivers could be enhanced to the level of 2–4 mm, by using multi-GNSS observations and limiting the noise level based on error modelling and filtering of the closely–spaced low-cost GNSS receivers. Finally, from the experiments and a real bridge monitoring application, it was proved that low-cost GNSS receivers could accurately define modal frequencies of ∼0.362 Hz and ∼1.680 Hz, respectively.