Navigation of land vehicles has been made possible in the recent years by the availability of pseudorange,
carrier phase and Doppler signals from one or more constellations of global navigation satellite systems
(GNSS), including Galileo, GPS and Beidou. While specific hardware is usually adopted for the navigation
task, recent developments have indicated that high-end smartphones with GNSS carrier phase tracking
capability can be used.
The topic of this thesis is the development of a smartphone based navigation filter for medium precision
applications. Several methodologies will be considered, including precise point positioning (PPP) and precise
point positioning real-time kinematic (PPP-RTK) methods. These methods are intended for application to
rovers and unmanned aircraft system (UAS).
The main objectives of the study are (a) the characterization of the quality of the GNSS measurements of the
selected smartphone with reference to a geodetic-grade GNSS receiver, (b) the design and development of
a real-time, model-based navigation filter, (c) testing and evaluation of the filter performance.
The use of the Android programming language is foreseen, exploiting the GNSS raw measurements and the
Android localization API. The student is expected to be familiar with either the Android or Java languages
and basic GNSS theory.
Interested students should contact prof. S. Casotto at stefano.casotto@unipd.it