An Integrated Open Positioning Platform For Machine Control And Beyond

This paper presents a new design for an integrated open positioning platform based on a Xilinx FPGA embedded system for machine control applications. The proposed platform consists of one of the latest Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA boards, GNSS and Locatalite front-ends, a multi-axis accelerometers and a GPRS/3G communication module. This platform can be configured not only to track multi-constellation GNSS satellites and Locatalites (ground based pseudo-satellites), receive network RTK corrections and permit two-way data exchange with the construction design/management office via GPRS/3G, but also to integrate inertial sensors using Kalman filtering, so it can provide real-time positioning solution with high reliability and high accuracy for demanding machine control applications. On the other hand, the platform could also be prototyped as a low-cost FPGA based GNSS receiver by removing the Locatalite front-ends, accelerometer and GPRS/3G module. Therefore, the platform is highly reconfigurable and could be adapted to many other positioning, tracking and navigation applications of different performance requirements. Moreover, the powerful Virtex-6 FPGA can act as a parallel processing engine for the acquisition and tracking of GNSS and Locatalite signals because of the nature of FPGA parallel processing.