Closed form ADOP expressions for single-frequency GNSS-based attitude determination

Abstract

Integer ambiguity resolution is a prerequisite to high-precision real-time GNSS-based attitude determination. The ADOP is a well-known scalar measure to infer whether ambiguity resolution can be expected successful or not. To compute ADOP it is sufficient to have knowledge about the measurement setup and the measurements noise characteristics; hence it can be used as a planning tool. In this contribution we present closed-form expressions for the ADOP in case of attitude determination. Using these expressions one may infer the impact of GNSS design aspects such as number of satellites, choice of frequency and the precision of the phase and code observables. In addition, they are useful to quantify the influence of the number of antennas in the configuration and the use of geometric constraints, such as the lengths of the baselines and/or the angles between the baselines in the configuration. In this article the behavior of the ADOPs as function of these design aspects will be evaluated for several GPS attitude determination scenarios.