GPS Vector Tracking Loop with Fault Detection and Exclusion

In this paper, both the integrity monitoring and fault detection and exclusion (FDE) mechanisms are incorporated into the vector tracking loop (VTL) architecture of the Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver for reliability enhancement. For the VTL, the tasks of signal tracking and navigation state estimation no longer process separately and a single extended Kalman filter (EKF) is employed to simultaneously track the received signals and estimate the receiver’s position, velocity, etc. In contrast to the scalar tracking loop (STL) which utilizes the independent parallel tracking loop approach, the VTL technique is beneficial from the correlation of each satellite signal and user dynamics. The VTL approach provides several important advantages. One of the merits is that the tracking loop can be assisted for overcoming the problem of signal blockage. Although the VTL architectures provide several important advantages, they suffer some fundamental drawbacks. For example, the errors in the navigation solutions may degrade the tracking accuracy. The most significant drawback is that failure of tracking in one channel may affect the entire tracking loop and possibly lead to loss of lock. For reliability enhancement, the EKF based integrity monitoring and FDE algorithms are developed to prevent the error from spreading into the entire tracking loop. The integrity monitoring is utilized to check the possible fault in the pseudorange and the pseudorange rate, followed by the FDE mechanism employed to exclude the abnormal satellite signals. Performance assessment and evaluation for the proposed approach will be presented.