Integrating low-cost GNSS and MEMS accelerometer for precise dynamic displacement monitoring

• Low-cost GNSS & IMU MEMS receiver and software for vibration detection was validated. • The low-cost sensor system meets the requirements of precise vibration monitoring. • Coupled low-cost sensor solution provides displacements with mm-level error. • Coupled low-cost sensor solution outperforms GNSS-only one in vibration monitoring. We assess the performance of the self-developed receiver coupling dual-frequency low-cost GNSS chipset and IMU MEMS sensor. The system also comprises software dedicated to vibration monitoring based on relative kinematic positioning in a post-processing mode. The observation assessment reveals high accuracy of low-cost GNSS and MEMS accelerometer data. The Septentrio Mosaic X5 chipset exhibits competitive to high-grade receivers’ phase observation noise, outperformance in code noise level and observation auto-correlation at a level that may be neglected even in high-rate applications. The evaluation of the MEMS accelerometer data proves that the sensor accuracy is adequate for vibration monitoring. With the shake table experiment, we examine the performance of vibration recovery. An advantage of the coupled solution over a GNSS-only one is documented with a 15 % reduction of the amplitude error. The backward smoothing of coupled solutions drives the next 20 % error drop. Finally, the high performance of the coupled solution based on low-cost GNSS & accelerometer is confirmed by a mean amplitude error of 0.4 mm. The frequency analyses indicate that both coupled and single-sensor solutions precisely detect the vibration frequencies; however, they also confirm the outperformance of the former over the latter. The power spectra of the recovered displacement time series accentuate the benefits of GNSS + accelerometer fusion and backward filtering for reducing displacement noise.