These days are being very exciting at GMV premises. magicPPP team is performing an experimentation campaign to demonstrate the performances of the our end-to-end solution (Correction service & PPP client) and assess its suitability for liability and safety critical applications such as autonomous vehicles, robots, UAVs or autonomous vessels.

Have a look in the next video to the most interesting moments of the tests and discover magicPPP’s capabilities. #DrivingTheFuture  #Besafer #magicPPP

The delay produced by the ionosphere is one of the largest sources of error in GNSS positioning. This error is typically removed by using a dual frequency receiver and processing the ionosphere-free combination. However, the usage of a dual frequency receiver increases the cost of the solution several orders of magnitude.

magicFAST is the new approach implemented in magicGNSS to minimize the impact of the ionospheric delay, even in case single frequency receivers are used. With this approach, a network of ground stations measures the ionospheric delay on a set of strategical positions, and this information is used to provide regional corrections to the users.

As an example of this new functionality, tests with a low-cost U-Blox NEO-M8T receiver have been performed. In these tests, regional corrections computed with a low-density network of stations (with the nearest station at a distance of around 300 km) have been injected in the PPP processing.

Static open-sky horizontal positioning error

Kinematic open-sky horizontal positioning error

Kinematic suburban horizontal positioning error

The accuracy achieved using magicFAST allows the implementation of features only reached by high-grade receivers, i.e. lane-change detection.

Lane change detection in urban environment

Estimated (red dots) vs. Reference (yellow line) trajectory

It has been found that magicFAST is capable of providing 20cm of positioning accuracy after only 5 minutes of PPP convergence and maintain these performances both in open sky and suburban environments with a low-cost receiver and a patch antenna.

Although reported as still under commissioning (http://www.gsc-europa.eu/system-status/Constellation-Information), after some apparent initial SIS tests, the 2 new FOC satellites; GSAT0208 (E08) and GSAT0209 (E09),  seem to be usable already. Some initial figures are shown below.

Satellite code-phase and carrier-phase residuals:

The following plot shows the GSAT0208 and GSAT0209 apparent clock estimations with respect to WTZR MGEX station:

The orbit and clock overlapping show comparable ODTS consistency compared to the other Galileo satellites.

The aforementioned shows that pending finishing GSAT0208 and GSAT0209 commissioning, there are already 11 Galileo usable satellites!

We have just released magicGNSS version 5.5 which incorporates a new version of the Precise Point Positioning algorithm (PPP). The new PPP is able to process GPS, GLONASS and GALILEO.

Multi-GNSS precise satellite orbits and clocks needed as input by PPP are computed beforehand using magicGNSS‘ ODTS module. Multi-GNSS orbits and clocks are available starting January 1, 2014, with a latency of around 1 day. The new PPP has the following processing modes: GPS-only, GLONASS-only, GPS+GLONASS, GALILEO-only, GPS+GALILEO, and GPS+GALILEO+GLONASS. It is also possible to use the PPP service by email.

magicGNSS/PPP with MULTI-GNSS support  was presented and demonstrated at the ION GNSS 2014 conference in Tampa, Florida, USA. The title of our paper was “magicGNSS‘ Real-Time POD and PPP MULTI-GNSS Service”.

Just a quick explanation about the meaning of station icons in magicGNSS:

GPS+GLONASS core station

GPS core station

Deselected station

Reference clock (in ODTS)

GPS+GLONASS user station with precise coordinates

GPS+GLONASS user station (or rover) with approximate coordinates

GPS user station with precise coordinates

GPS user station (or rover) with approximate coordinates

GPS+GLONASS public station with precise coordinates

GPS+GLONASS public station with approximate coordinates

GPS public station with precise coordinates

GPS public station with approximate coordinates

Multi-GNSS core station

Multi-GNSS user station with precise coordinates

Multi-GNSS user station with approximate coordinates