Performance Evaluation of Tightly-Coupled INS/PPP Integrated Navigation in Remote Marine Surveying Application

In this paper, we integrate the high-precision inertial navigation system (INS) with the GPS precise point positioning (PPP) by using the tightly-coupled architecture, which aims to obtain the preferable attitude and positioning information in the remote marine applications. The structure of INS/PPP tightly-coupled integrated navigation is presented firstly in the paper. Then, the observation model in the local geographic frame (ENU frame) is derived, where the Extend Kalman filter (EKF) is used for the information fusion. Finally, a real shipborne marine test is conducted to test the performance of INS/PPP tightly coupled integration. The experimental results show that the positioning accuracy of the integrated navigation system can be better than 10cm in the horizontal axis and 20cm for the vertical channel, and the attitude estimation error can be smaller than 1 arcsec. Besides this, the performance the tightly-coupled integration can be maintained during 100s simulated signal outages, while that performance of loosely-coupled integration will degrade significantly in such a case.