How to identify, isolate, and analyse GNSS Anomalies

Last Updated: 13/02/2023 08:45     Created at: 13/02/2023 08:45

Final Presentation of NAVISP Project EL2 001 now available:

On Thursday, February 09 2023, GMV NSL Ltd  presented the results of the NAVISP project “Crowd-Sourced Platform for GNSS Anomaly Identification, Isolation and Attribution Analysis (COLOSSUS).” Over 50 people from industry and research followed the interesting presentation and the subsequent interactive Q&A session.

GNSS applications are evolving at an accelerating pace, providing position-, navigation-, and time-based services to an ever-growing number of users. Increasingly, these applications are safety-critical and demand trust from GNSS, often also referred to as integrity, continuity, reliability, dependability, security or confidence. It is therefore necessary to not only monitor GNSS performance within specified tolerances to meet the needs of these new applications, but also to provide diagnostics when performance falls outside of tolerance. In this context, the objective of the activity COLOSSUS was to provide a system monitor GNSS which can also analyse any detected errors and failures. The Crowd-Sourced Platform for GNSS Anomaly Identification, Isolation and Attribution Analysis, known as COLOSSUS, is a tool to support developers and users of GNSS in application areas that require the highest levels of security, reliability, availability and dependability.

During the project phase, GMV NSL Ltd. was able to develop the cloud based GNSS data processing platform COLOSSUS and demonstrate continuous, automatic, real-time processing and fault detection, as well as routine post-processing to produce performance statistics and reports for Galileo, GPS and GLONASS constellations. A series of dedicated COLOSSUS receivers were deployed as network of monitoring sites across Europe, and the system was able to leverage GMV’s existing global Continuously Operating Reference Station (CORS) networks to achieve worldwide real-time data provision. RINEX data from IGS sites was also processed and the COLOSSUS system can be expanded to include other public and private CORS networks.

The COLOSSUS platform offers a commercial service to provide users with current GNSS status (satellite status, planned outages, almanac health), broadcast status (last message received, health flag, SISA) and monitored status (detection of faults, loss of satellite signals) to warn users of issues which may affect performance in real time. Depending on customer needs, the service can generate monthly (or longer term) statistics reporting to compare with GNSS performance specs and can generate forecast performance values using defined requirements to give users information on expected performance.

Thanks to the support of NAVISP, GMV NSL was able to develop a continuously operating tool that allows a safer use of GNSS in a formal, structured, and validated manner through continuous monitoring and reporting of performance, faults, failures, failures, and recovery times.  These statistics and metrics are critical for GNSS to continue to be used to provide positioning, navigation, and timing services in the emerging robotics and autonomous systems markets, as well as for other critical operations.

COLOSSUS has created a service that can be offered commercially in various configurations. Customers can choose between a subscription-based service hosted by GMV, or they can host the service themselves, but with restricted rights.

In the next steps, it is planned to include Beidou and SBAS, and has the potential to include new GNSS constellations, systems, and services as they become available.

The project was part of NAVISP Element 2, which aims to maintain and improve the capabilities and competitiveness of the participating States' industry in the global market for satellite navigation and, more broadly, PNT technologies and services.

More detailed information can be found in the slides of the Final Presentation.