Tight Integration of GNSS Measurements and GNSS-based Collaborative Virtual Ranging

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and Inertial Navigation System (INS) are nowadays widely integrated among mass-market devices, thus merging the benefits of satellite-based absolute positioning and continuity, low-noise and high-rate measurements from a variety of proprioceptive sensors. Other technologies such as Ultra-wideband (UWB), Lidar and cameras allow to passively retrieve range measurements, thus providing additional data suitable for the integration with GNSS. However, they work only if Line-Of-Sight propagation is granted. To overcome this limitation, previous work have introduced the Inter Agent Range (IAR) concept as a mean based on GNSS-only measurement shared by collaborative peers. This paper aims at evaluating the feasibility of a GNSS/IAR tight integration by means of a proper Extended Kalman Filter of such collaborative measurements and satellite-to-receiver ranges, exploiting a communication network infrastructure (i.e. 5G). Intermediate estimation stages are presented to support computation and integration of IAR for receivers which face poor positioning performances. The analysis of the different sources of uncertainty is also provided by means of a simulation environment. Furthermore, the performance on realistic trajectories are discussed for the proposed solution and evaluated by taking into account the communication delays between the agents.