Recently in various industries, the use of unmanned vehicles increases. In order to operate unmanned vehicles in various environment and dynamic conditions, the strict Required Navigation Performance (RNP) of unmanned vehicles should be satisfied like that of manned aircrafts. In addition to the strict RNP, high positional integrity based on current various precise positioning technologies should be applied to Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). However due to the impact of high-rise buildings and several geographic features in urban areas, it is hard to guarantee to get the minimum required number of visible satellites for Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) navigation continuously. In this reason, the Global Position System (GPS) standalone positioning technologies is hard to applied to unmanned aerial vehicles urban flight. In urban canyon, the availability and accuracy of the unmanned aerial vehicle’s position decrease due to the lack of satellites visibility and poor Dilution of Precision (DOP). To enhance the positioning accuracy in urban areas, the integration of GPS positioning system with the cellular based positioning is tried recently. Especially in Korea, cellular network infrastructure are well-constructed such that three major carriers had already deployed over 440,000 base stations until 2014. Therefore it is expected that the cellular positioning technology will be effectively applied to unmanned aerial vehicles urban flight. In this research, we analyze the GPS/Cellular integrated positioning performance using MATLAB simulation. To simulate the real situation, 3D map information near the Teheran Street is used. It is expected that the results of this simulation can be used for the development of accurate and effective Location-Based Service (LBS) for unmanned aerial vehicle urban flight.

Keywords: GPS, cellular, 3D digital map, arrangement of cellular base station

Speaker Hyo-Jeong Seok*