The Impact of Ionospheric Irregularities in Autonomous Systems Operations.

Due to the increasing number of autonomous equipment, accurate geolocation enabled by GNSS has become a key technology. To better use the GNSS, it is paramount to understand factors that can cause interference and be sources of errors, such as ionospheric scintillation. We address an investigation collecting data of ionospheric irregularities (represented by fp, Fp, Irot, and ROTI indexes) in two mining sites located in Brazil. By analyzing the data, it was possible to confirm the ionospheric irregularities occurrences and estimate the operational impact. Furthermore, to reduce the effect caused by the scintillation, a new base station was added, aiming to enable a multi-constellation and multi-frequency strategy. It tracks both GPS, Glonass, Galileo, and Beidou satellites and three carriers for each constellation, one in the higher band (1500-1630 Mhz) and two in the lower band (1170-1300 MHz). After applying these actions, an operational downtime reduction due to the loss of accuracy was noticed, from 110.19 hours/month to 21.73 hours/month on average.