Set-Based Position Ambiguity Reduction Method for Zonotope Shadow Matching in Urban Areas Using Estimated Multipath Errors

In urban areas, the quality of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals deteriorates, leading to reduced positioning accuracy. To address this issue, 3D-mapping-aided (3DMA) techniques, such as shadow matching and zonotope shadow matching (ZSM), have been proposed. However, these methods can introduce a problem known as multi-modal position ambiguity, making it challenging to select the exact mode in which the receiver is located. Accurately selecting the correct mode is essential for improving positioning accuracy. A previous study proposed a method that uses satellite-pseudorange consistency (SPC), calculated from pseudorange measurements, to select the mode containing the receiver. This method achieved a mode selection accuracy of approximately 78%. To further enhance accuracy, the study utilized pseudorange measurements collected at multiple timesteps from a fixed location and a trained line-of-sight (LOS) classifier. However, in practice, collecting data at multiple timesteps from the same location in dynamic environments is challenging. Moreover, the performance of the trained LOS classifier heavily depends on the surrounding environment, leading to low reliability. In this study, we propose a method that estimates and corrects multipath errors based on the mode distribution obtained from the output of ZSM and extract an enhanced SPC using the corrected pseudorange measurements. This enables high mode selection accuracy using only single-timestep pseudorange measurements, without requiring a trained LOS classifier. Experimental results using global positioning system (GPS) data collected in an urban environment demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a mode selection accuracy of 91%, compared to 86% for the existing method. Furthermore, when calculating the receiver’s position based on the selected mode, the proposed method achieves a root mean square (RMS) error of 16.87 m, representing a 4.7% improvement over the 17.70 m RMS error of the existing method.