Performance Evaluation Of Geodetic Real Time Kinematic Units Under Various Signal Reception Conditions

Abstract

Real Time Kinematic (RTK) GNSS is an important positioning technique not only for classic surveying tasks, but has become a part of everyday life as new fields of application such as autonomous driving arise. Especially for kinematic applications hardly any research about the performance of geodetic RTK systems has been carried out so far. In most cases only the manufacturers themselves have evaluated their own products. By testing two RTK systems under various signal reception conditions for static and kinematic applications we strive to investigate their accuracy and precision. Our experiments show that results obtained by static measurements under good signal reception conditions yield an accuracy better than 3 cm as can be expected for standard RTK measurements, whereas the tested systems perform significantly worse under unfavourable conditions. Cumulative histograms show the reduced accuracy obtained from kinematic measurements.