Integrity monitoring of high-accuracy GNSS-based attitude determination

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based attitude determination has been widely used in the navigation fields. The reliability of attitude determination is indispensable for safety-critical applications. Since the multi-antenna-based attitude determination uses ultra-short baseline carrier phase double differential processing, the incorrect ambiguity resolution and the excessive measurement error are two main factors affecting the reliability of attitude determination. Since the ambiguity correctness validation cannot guarantee the reliability of the attitude solution, therefore an integrity monitoring method is proposed for the attitude determination in the measurement domain. The proposed integrity monitoring method constructs double test statistics to satisfy the requirements of integrity risk and continuity risk, simultaneously. Furthermore, the attitude alarm limit has been derived from the required navigation performance as the threshold to test the availability of attitude determination. The performance of the proposed method is tested by conducting the static and kinematic experiments, respectively. The static results have shown that the proposed integrity monitoring method is able to monitor the ambiguity fault and the excessive measurement noise. The real-world kinematic data have indicated that the proposed method can reduce the maximum attitude error by about 2.3°, when compared with the standalone ratio-test method.