The Comparison and Analysis of Maritime Precise Positioning using GPS Based Smartphone

Abstract

According to the Korea Coast Guard’s maritime disaster statistics (Korea Coast Guard 2017, Korean Statistical information Service 2018), an average of 2,140 marine accidents occurred every year for the past 6 years and the number of accidents is increasing every year. Among them, maritime accidents of fishing vessels are the most frequent, and recently accidents involving fishing boat and leisure vessels are rapidly increasing as well. In particular, the number of accidents involving leisure vessels increased to about one-third of the accidents of fishing vessels, and emergency rescue requests are increasing every year accordingly. However, the number of crash accidents involving users of small vessels and marine leisure activities are increasing because of the difficulties of installing navigation equipment and electronic navigation charts. Recently, the demand for precise positioning using mobile devices is increasing in the fields of maritime safety, piloting support, and coastal survey. Although various applications of smart devices provide location-based services for users, the measurement results are discontinuous when using the position coordinates of the National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) calculated by smartphone. Recently, Google announced that they will provide GPS raw data to developers from Android 7.0 Nougat. As a result, developers have an opportunity to receive precise carrier phase and code measurements to make more accurate positioning according to the performance of Android devices. This study analyzed GPS positioning performance using Android devices, and compared and analyzed the positioning performance at sea with high-performance GPS receivers.