A Review on the Usage of RTKLIB for Precise Navigation of Unmanned Vehicles

Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) is a phase-based differential GNSS technique and uses additional observations from permanent reference stations to mitigate or eliminate effects like atmospheric delays or satellite clocks and orbit errors. In particular, as the position accuracy required in the fields of autonomous vehicles and drones is gradually increasing, the demand for RTK-based precise navigation that can provide cm-level position is increasing. Recently, with the rapid growth of the open-source software market, the use of open-source software for building navigation system of unmanned vehicles, which is difficult to mount an expensive GNSS receivers, is gradually increasing. RTKLIB is an open-source software package that can perform RTK positioning and is widely used for research and education purposes. However, since the performance and stability of RTK algorithm of RTKLIB is inevitably inferior to that of commercial GNSS receivers, users need to verify whether RTKLIB can satisfy the navigation performance requirements of unmanned vehicles. Therefore, in this paper, the performance evaluation of the RTK positioning algorithm of RTKLIB was performed using GNSS observation data acquired in a dynamic environment. Therefore, in this paper, the RTK positioning performance of RTKLIB was evaluated using GNSS observation data acquired in a dynamic environment. Our results show that the current RTK algorithm of RTKLIB is not suitable for precise navigation of unmanned vehicles.