Continuous High-Precision Positioning in Smartphones by FGO-Based Fusion of GNSS–PPK and PDR

Abstract

The availability of raw Global Navigation Satellites System (GNSS) measurements in Android smartphones fosters advancements in high-precision positioning for mass-market devices. However, challenges like inconsistent pseudo-range and carrier phase observations, limited dual-frequency data integrity, and unidentified hardware biases on the receiver side prevent the ambiguity resolution of smartphone GNSS. Consequently, relying solely on GNSS for high-precision positioning may result in frequent cycle slips in complex conditions such as deep urban canyons, underpasses, forests, and indoor areas due to non-line-of-sight (NLOS) and multipath conditions. Inertial/GNSS fusion is the traditional common solution to tackle these challenges because of their complementary capabilities. For pedestrians and smartphones with low-cost inertial sensors, the usual architecture is Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR)+ GNSS. In addition to this, different GNSS processing techniques like Precise Point Positioning (PPP) and Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) have also been integrated with INS. However, integration with PDR has been limited and only with Kalman Filter (KF) and its variants being the main fusion techniques. Recently, Factor Graph Optimization (FGO) has started to be used as a fusion technique due to its superior accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, on the one hand, no work has tested the fusion of GNSS Post-Processed Kinematics (PPK) and PDR on smartphones. And, on the other hand, the works that have evaluated the fusion of GNSS and PDR employing FGO have always performed it using the GNSS Single-Point Positioning (SPP) technique. Therefore, this work aims to combine the use of the GNSS PPK technique and the FGO fusion technique to evaluate the improvement in accuracy that can be obtained on a smartphone compared with the usual GNSS SPP and KF fusion strategies. We improved the Google Pixel 4 smartphone GNSS using Post-Processed Kinematics (PPK) with the open-source RTKLIB 2.4.3 software, then fused it with PDR via KF and FGO for comparison in offline mode. Our findings indicate that FGO-based PDR+GNSS–PPK improves accuracy by 22.5% compared with FGO-based PDR+GNSS–SPP, which shows smartphones obtain high-precision positioning with the implementation of GNSS–PPK via FGO.