Fusion of Multi-Antenna Carrier Phase Differential GPS and Inertial Measurements for Performance Evaluation of High Accuracy Integrated Aircraft Navigation Systems

This paper presents a prototypical test system for field performance assessment of integrated aircraft navigation systems. Since real time operation is not necessary, the test system relies on off-line data processing and analysis. Design requirements for the test system are cm-level error in position and better than 0.1 deg accuracy in absolute attitude estimation in dynamic conditions. It implements the concept of GPS-aided inertial navigation. Specifically, to get high accuracy in position and attitude the test system exploits carrier phase differential GPS (with a fixed ground antenna as base station) and a multiple antenna configuration onboard the moving vehicle. Accuracy and availability of the GPS differential solution benefit from the fact that the solution is not required in real time. The system architecture and adopted algorithms are described in the paper. First results of experimental tests conducted with a partial test setup are presented, which clearly show the potential of the proposed approach.