An Open-Source Gazebo Plugin for GNSS Multipath Signal Emulation in Virtual Urban Canyons

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open-source Gazebo plugin that simulates GNSS multipath errors in virtual urban canyons using ray tracing, enabling realistic testing for robotics applications.

Contribution

The authors developed a real-time Gazebo plugin that models GNSS multipath effects in urban environments with validated accuracy, enhancing simulation capabilities.

Findings

The plugin accurately replicates GNSS multipath errors in urban canyon scenarios.

Validation against Urban-Nav dataset confirms the plugin's effectiveness.

Open-source availability promotes widespread use in robotics research.

Abstract

One of the major errors affecting GNSS signals in urban canyons is GNSS multipath error. In this work, we develop a Gazebo plugin which utilizes a ray tracing technique to account for multipath effects in a virtual urban canyon environment using virtual satellites. This software plugin balances accuracy and computational complexity to run the simulation in real-time for both software-in-the-loop (SITL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) testing. We also construct a 3D virtual environment of Hong Kong and compare the results from our plugin with the GNSS data in the publicly available Urban-Nav dataset, to validate the efficacy of the proposed Gazebo Plugin. The plugin is openly available to all the researchers in the robotics community. https://github.com/kpant14/multipath_sim