Improving reliability and efficiency of RTK ambiguity resolution using multiple rover receivers connected to the same antenna

Precise position information is significantly required for specific application scenarios like autonomous driving of vehicles or precise mobile mapping. Until recently, to satisfy the sub-meter or even centimeter-level demanding for this type of application, the GNSS carrier phase measurements appear mandatory. In this paper, we firstly use multiple rover receivers to enhance the performance of the RTK positioning in different environments by connecting them to the same antenna thus multiplying the number of observations by the number of receivers. We demonstrate through different simulation scenarios that we are able to improve some internal steps of precise position computation and the simulations results show that our multi-receiver RTK system is more robust to noise and degraded satellite geometry, in terms of ambiguity fixing rate, and get a better position accuracy under same conditions when comparing to the single receiver system. An analysis is also conducted by varying the correlation coefficient of the noise between the measurements to the same satellite performed by the different receivers to verify the advantage of our proposed system when dealing with highly correlated noise.