using PDOP to estimate Kalman filters measurement noise covariance for GPS Positioning

Abstract

GPS is widely used nowadays but with the absolute positioning technology which is used commonly, the positioning accuracy is not high enough. Many studies use Kalman filter to improve the accuracy of the GPS positioning. As we know, we have to determine the measurement noise covariance whenmodeling the Kalman filter, most of the studies do not pay attention on this and just consider it as a constant. In this paper, we propose a novel method to use the PDOP which can be obtained from the GPS data easily to estimate the measurement noise covariance of the Kalman filter.