Dynamic base station DGPS for cooperative vehicle localization

Cooperative approaches are becoming of great interest in automotive research. One of the most important ITS applications is cooperative localization. In this paper, the concept of a dynamic base station DGPS (DDGPS) and its application in the vehicular cooperative localization is introduced and discussed. The DDGPS is a decentralized cooperative method which aims to improve the GPS positioning by estimating and compensating the common error in GPS pseudorange measurements. It can be seen as an extension of DGPS where the base stations are not necessarily static with an exact known position. In the DDGPS method, the pseudorange corrections are estimated, based on the receiver´s belief on its positioning and its uncertainty, and then broadcasted to other GPS receivers. A new method for fusing all the received corrections from different sources is proposed and the data dependency problem is also discussed.