A real-time integrated
vehicle positioning method and
system with
differential GPS can substantially solve the problems encountered in either the
global positioning system-only or the
inertial navigation system-only, such as loss of global positioning
satellite signal, sensitivity to jamming and spoofing, and an inertial solution's drift over time. In the present invention, the velocity and acceleration from an inertial navigation processor of the integrated GPS / INS
system are used to aid the code and
carrier phase tracking of the
global positioning system satellite signals, so as to enhance the performance of the global positioning and inertial integration
system, even in heavy jamming and high dynamic environments. To improve the accuracy of the integrated GPS / INS
navigation system, phase measurements are used and the idea of the
differential GPS is employed. However, integer ambiguities have to be resolved for high accuracy positioning. Therefore, in the present invention a new on-the-fly
ambiguity resolution technique is disclosed to resolve
double difference integer ambiguities. The real-time fully-coupled GPS / IMU
vehicle positioning system includes an IMU (
inertial measurement unit), a GPS processor, and a
data link which are connected to a central navigation processor to produce a navigation solution that is output to an I / O (input / output) interface.