Abstract:

Multi-sensor fusion is a core terminal technology in the national comprehensive positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) system. However, existing multi-sensor fusion frameworks often require pre-configuration and task-specific customization, making it difficult to achieve rapid and seamless reconfiguration in multi-scenario and multi-task PNT applications. Users are therefore forced to repeatedly adjust both PNT software and hardware settings. To address this issue, this paper proposes a unified and general multi-sensor fusion framework, termed componentized PNT. The framework theoretically supports the flexible integration of sensors of arbitrary types and quantities in a blind-plug-and-play manner, fundamentally enhancing the adaptability of PNT systems in complex environments. Based on an edge-computing architecture, the framework adopts standardized hardware and software interfaces, deploying the sensor-specific measurement modeling module on the edge sensor side and the sensor-shared fusion module on the central PNT platform. The interaction between the two modules is standardized through a unified mathematical representation, thereby overcoming the inherent limitation of traditional frameworks that require sensor pre-configuration on the PNT platform. Based on a self-developed prototype for the componentized PNT system, real-time experiments were conducted under complex scenarios involving sensor connection, removal, and replacement. The results validate the blind-plug-and-play capability of the proposed system, as well as its autonomous reconfiguration ability during multi-domain transitions and dynamic sensor switching. Experimental results show that as the number and diversity of sensors increase, the componentized PNT system achieves immediate improvements in real-time positioning performance, exhibiting high operational efficiency during transitions between different scenarios.

Key words: national comprehensive PNT, multi-sensor fusion, componentized PNT, blind-plug-and-play