Ground-based phase wind-up and its application in yaw angle determination.

Ground-based phase wind-up effect (GPWU) is caused by the rotation of receiving antenna. It had been studied and applied in rapidly rotation platforms, such as sounding rocket, guided missile and deep space exploration. In Global Navigation Satellite System high accuracy positioning applications, however, most studies treated it as an error source and focused on eliminating this effect in Precision Point Positioning and Real Time Kinematic (RTK) positioning. The GPWU effect is also sensitive to the rotational status of the antenna, in particular the yaw angle variations. In this paper we explore the feasibility of yaw angle determination of relatively slow rotation platforms based on the GPWU effect. We use the geometry-free carrier phase observations from a RTK base and a moving station receivers to estimate the cumulative yaw angle of the moving platform. Several experiments, including rotating platform tests, vehicle and shipborne tests were carried out. The cumulative errors of rotating platform tests are under 0.38 $$^{\circ }$$ , indicating good long-term accuracy of the GPWU determined yaw angle. But the RMS are in a range of 11.98 $$^{\circ }$$ and 17.39 $$^{\circ }$$ , indicating the errors, such as multipath effect, are not negligible and should be further investigated. The RMS of vehicle and shipborne tests using a base station of 9-11 km are 24.77 $$^{\circ }$$ and 23.66 $$^{\circ }$$ . In order to evaluate the influence of the differential ionospheric delay, another vehicle test was carried out using a base station located less than 1 km to the vehicle. The RMS reduces to 15.11 $$^{\circ }$$ , which gains 39.00 % improvement than before, and demonstrates that the differential ionospheric delay even from a few kilometers long baseline still cannot be neglected. These tests validate the feasibility of GPWU for real-time yaw angle determination. Since this method is able to determine the yaw angle with a minimum one satellite, such a unique feature provides potential applications for attitude determination in the environment with poor sky visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]