Locata performance in a long term monitoring

Abstract

Today’s monitoring schemes often demand fully or partly automated networks to be established, with the operations done remotely. Ease of use lead to the increasingly dominant position of GNSS within the market. This method’s include limitations includes accuracy, reliability and integrity dependence on the number and geometric distribution of the available satellites. To amend that, pseudolite systems have been suggested as an alternative or companion to GNSS.

Pseudolites share characteristics with GNSS and offer deployment flexibility, providing a optimisation of the geometry. Locata is one of such system, capable of centimetre level stand-alone positioning even in difficult environments. Prior research has identified Locata capacity for system for structural monitoring, but focused on planar positioning only.

This paper discusses the results of a dedicated five days monitoring trial, without system reinitialisation, focusing on height performance and identification of any biases preventing Locata from being employed as a monitoring system. It performance is tested against the RTK-GPS results.