The goal of this paper is to present a methodology for quality control of horizontal geodetic networks through robustness and covariance analysis. In the proposed methodology, the positional accuracy of each point is estimated by a possible bias in their position (based on robustness analysis), in addition to its own positional precision (uncertainty) (through covariance analysis), being a measure independently from the choice of the datum. Besides presenting the theoretical development of the method, its application is demonstrated in a numerical example. The results indicate that, in general, the greater the distance of an unknown point to the control(s) point(s) of the network, the greater is the propagation of random errors on this unknown point, and the smaller the number of redundant observations around a unknown point, the greater the influence of possible (undetected) non-random errors on this point.
Robustness Analysis; Geodetic Networks; Positional Accuracy
