Unconventional integrated navigation systems based on redundancy of traditional navigation sensors

In this work several unconventional navigation systems are presented that include redundancy of traditional navigation sensors. Main focus is on sensor architectures, while sensor fusion algorithms will be treated as a secondary aspect. Specifically, an analysis of systems with multiple IMUs, Gyro-free INS and GPS derived attitude has been performed. Several reasons justify the application of architectures with redundant navigation sensors; the most relevant obviously concerns the capability to detect and identify some faults. Anyway, sensor redundancy also allows increasing the accuracy of some measurements (as for example in multiple IMU’s systems) or avoiding the use of some sensors, which may have disadvantages in terms of costs or accuracy, without renounce to their measurements (as for example in Gyro-free INS). In fact these systems are based on the application of pseudo-measurements.