Quality Control Issues Relating to an Attitude Determination System using a Multi-Antenna GPS array

A multi-antenna GPS array has been used by many researchers and in practise and to determine the attitude parameters of a mobile platform. At the heart of high accuracy real-time GPS-based attitude determination is the quick and correct resolution of the carrier phase ambiguities. So far the majority of research has focused on improving the time-to-ambiguity resolution, and in improving the accuracy of the derived yaw, pitch and roll parameters. In most cases this has involved refinements to the attitude determination computation algorithm, or through the aiding of an inertial navigation system. Of equal importance to an improvement in the accuracy of the attitude parameters are the issues relating to improving the quality control and reliability of the solution, as well as the detection and identification of outliers. This may be influenced by such factors as the different antenna configurations, the type of GPS receiver used, the addition of navigation sensors for augmentation, and the data processing techniques used to determine the attitude parameters. This paper will investigate the effects of several factors that influence the precision, and reliability, of the estimated attitude parameters. A number of simulation studies will be described, that demonstrate what is theoretically expected of such attitude determination systems. These results will be compared with a series of experiments set-up to verify the outcomes of the simulations.