LiDAR Aided Cycle Slip Detection for GNSS Real-time Kinematic Positioning in Urban Environments

Cycle slip of carrier-phase measurements is a common error source in global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning. It limits the performance of the GNSS-RTK in urban canyons due to the excessive signal reflections from buildings. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a LiDAR-aided cycle slip detection method for GNSS-RTK, which benefits from the consecutive relative pose estimated by LiDAR odometry. Specifically, the difference between the triple-differenced carrier-phase measurements and that of prediction based on the LiDAR odometry is used to detect the potential cycle slips. The associated integer ambiguity is reestimated if the cycle slip is observed to obtain an improved GNSS-RTK positioning. Experiments were conducted in a typical urban scenario of Hong Kong to verify the performance and effectiveness of the proposed method. The results demonstrated that the performance of the cycle slip can be effectively improved using the proposed method compared to the conventional loss of lock indicator (LLI) based method. Both the GNSS-RTK fixing rate and positioning accuracy can be improved by 17.33% and 13.86%, respectively with the help of the proposed LiDAR-aided method.