Standalone and RTK GNSS on 30,000 km of North American Highways

TL;DR

This study evaluates GNSS accuracy and reliability on 30,000 km of North American highways, demonstrating that multi-frequency RTK GNSS significantly improves vehicle positioning for advanced driver assistance and automated driving systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive assessment of GNSS performance in real-world highway conditions, highlighting the benefits of multi-frequency RTK corrections for automotive positioning.

Findings

Automotive GNSS achieves 98% availability for road-level positioning.

RTK corrections improve lane-level accuracy to 98%.

Multi-frequency RTK GNSS provides 99.5% road accuracy and 98% lane accuracy.

Abstract

There is a growing need for vehicle positioning information to support Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), Connectivity (V2X), and Automated Driving (AD) features. These range from a need for road determination (<5 meters), lane determination (<1.5 meters), and determining where the vehicle is within the lane (<0.3 meters). This work examines the performance of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) on 30,000 km of North American highways to better understand the automotive positioning needs it meets today and what might be possible in the near future with wide area GNSS correction services and multi-frequency receivers. This includes data from a representative automotive production GNSS used primarily for turn-by-turn navigation as well as an Inertial Navigation System which couples two survey grade GNSS receivers with a tactical grade Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to act as ground truth. The latter utilized networked Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) GNSS corrections delivered over a cellular modem in real-time. We assess on-road GNSS accuracy, availability, and continuity. Availability and continuity are broken down in terms of satellite visibility, satellite geometry, position type (RTK fixed, RTK float, or standard positioning), and RTK correction latency over the network. Results show that current automotive solutions are best suited to meet road determination requirements at 98% availability but are less suitable for lane determination at 57%. Multi-frequency receivers with RTK corrections were found more capable with road determination at 99.5%, lane determination at 98%, and highway-level lane departure protection at 91%.