Performance of a New Low-Cost GPS Sensor with an Average Process for Slope Displacement Monitoring

The Global Positioning System (GPS) has been widely used for monitoring displacements of civil engineering structures. The second author and his colleagues developed an automatic GPS system to continuously monitor 3-dimensional displacements with millimeter accuracies. The system has been used to hundreds of fields in Japan, e.g., landslides, dams, etc. However, the cost of the sensor and the monitoring system are still quite expensive compared to standard geotechnical instruments. In this paper, the performance of a new low-cost GPS sensor with an average process is investigated to verify the applicability and reliability for displacement monitoring. This is done by performing experiments in which data are processed by the kinematic method. The standard deviations are improved by taking the average of the kinematic results.