Relative Positioning in Remote Areas Using a GNSS Dual Frequency Smartphone

Abstract

The use of GPS positioning and navigation capabilities in mobile phones is present in our daily lives for more than a decade, but never with the centimeter level of precision that can actually be reached with several of the most recent smartphones. The introduction of the new GNSS systems (Global Navigation Satellite Systems), the European system Galileo, is opening new horizons in a wide range of areas that rely on precise georeferencing, namely the mass market smartphones apps. The constant growth of this market has brought new devices with innovative capabilities in hardware and software. The introduction of the Android 7 by Google, allowing access to the GNSS raw code and phase measurements, and the arrival of the new chip from Broadcom BCM47755 providing dual frequency in some smartphones came to revolutionize the positioning performance of these devices as never seen before. The Xiaomi Mi8 was the first smartphone to combine those features, and it is the device used in this work. It is well known that it is possible to obtain centimeter accuracy with this kind of device in relative static positioning mode with distances to a reference station up to a few tens of kilometers, which we also confirm in this paper. However, the main purpose of this work is to show that we can also get good positioning accuracy using long baselines. We used the ability of the Xiaomi Mi8 to get dual frequency code and phase raw measurements from the Galileo and GPS systems, to do relative static positioning in post-processing mode using wide baselines, of more than 100 km, to perform precise surveys. The results obtained were quite interesting with RMSE below 30 cm, showing that this type of smartphone can be easily used as a low-cost device, for georeferencing and mapping applications. This can be quite useful in remote areas where the CORS networks are not dense or even not available.