Azimuth Estimation of a Moving Receiver by GPS Speed Measurement

The azimuth of a moving receiver is of vital importance for navigation and positioning. Generally, satellite systems such as GPS are considered that they cannot measure azimuthal angle with a single receiver, so, related angle information of a single receiver cannot be obtained directly, either. This paper proposes that these systems can get the real-time azimuth of a moving receiver through real-time resolution on the basis of speed measurement, albeit they themselves may not be able to measure the posture of the user terminal. This paper also studies and elaborates the principle above and analyzes its precision. The feasibility and precision of this method are verified by comparing the angle measurement results of magnetometer sensor in the actual measurement experiment of vehicle positioning. Results show that using GPS speed measurement to estimate the azimuth of a moving receiver is feasible, although it is impossible to estimate the azimuth of the posture of the user terminal. And the precision is related to the speed of the receiver-when the receiver moves up to certain speed, high precision can be obtained. Moreover, the azimuth information gotten by the method can also be used as a quantity of state in such models as Kalman filtering of positioning results and further improve its accuracy.