Daniel Willi

ETH Zurich, Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology

Papers

Total Citations

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About

Daniel Willi is a leading expert in high-precision Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) antenna calibration, a critical field for ensuring the accuracy of modern positioning, navigation, and timing applications. His primary research focuses on developing and validating absolute field calibration methods for multi-GNSS receiver antennas, directly addressing the directional-dependent errors that degrade GNSS signal quality. Willi’s major contribution is the pioneering use of six-axis industrial robots for this calibration, a technique that achieves unprecedented precision by physically rotating the antenna through thousands of orientations on a short baseline. His most cited work, “Absolute field calibration for multi-GNSS receiver antennas at ETH Zurich” (2019, 23 citations), establishes a robust, field-deployable standard. Complementing this, his 2018 paper on robot-based calibration (11 citations) details the methodology, while his 2019 study (6 citations) rigorously quantifies the robot’s own mechanical errors, showing that uncalibrated tool-point scatter is only 0.5–0.7 mm. This meticulous approach has made Willi’s work foundational for geodesy, surveying, and satellite navigation, directly improving the reliability of GNSS-dependent infrastructure worldwide.