GNSS Receiver for High-Precision Satellite Navigation in the Area of Road Construction

The asphalt road construction, as well as the quality of the road, relies nowadays to a great extend on the experience of the road construction workers. The development of a system for machine control and fleet management on an asphalt road construction site, which enables building roads of better quality and durability, was the main objective of the described work. Especially the mass flow of asphalt and the detailed optimization of different machine control loops as well as quality dependent measurement systems can bring a significant improvement of the process and final quality. The improvements are based on real-time and position information. Here, a GNSS receiver as main positioning utility was developed for the applications. The paper describes the research work that was conducted within the European GNSS Agency funded project "advanced Galileo navigation system for asphalt fleet machines" (ASPHALT) with the final objective to build roads of better quality and durability. The project was finished successfully in May 2012. This paper introduces the ASPHALT project, describes the developed GNSS receiver, the antenna, the RF frontend, and the baseband; the RTK solution to achieve the high precision position solution; the PVT solution, and the EDAS implementation to provide continuous EGNOS correction data stream for position calculation. Furthermore, test results of static and dynamic measurements show the performance of the developed GNSS receiver and the whole system.