Cooperative navigation of vehicles using mutual retransmission of GNSS's signals

Transportation is important part of economics, and like other industries transportation is being under intensive automation, so there is hard request for improvement of navigation systems performance. One of the possible ways of such improvements is so called “cooperative navigation” which is based on joint processing of navigation parameters. Here we study a novel approach to joint processing of raw GNSS (global navigation satellite systems) measurements and resulting cooperative navigation of swarm of vehicles. Our approach is based on retransmission of received GNSS signals by a vehicle. Surrounding vehicles receive direct GNSS signals and retransmitted GNSS signals. Joint processing of direct and retransmitted signals leads to estimation of relative baseline vector between pair of vehicles. This can be done even with two GNSS signals, and that is very suitable for navigation in urban canyon. The obtained mutual baseline vector is used to track relative movement of pair of vehicles and to warn possible collision danger. The paper discusses features of proposed approach and relation between uncertainty of raw GNSS measurements and uncertainty of resulting mutual positioning.