Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Technological developments in the realm of satellite navigation have led to innovative concepts in the mission management of current and next generation air, land and sea vehicles. Navigation systems including GNSS or integrated GNSS/INS are being used extensively today in most aerospace platforms around the world and new promising technologies are being explored. The great majority of current manned and unmanned aerial vehicles perform attitude determination tasks by using inertial sensors (ring laser gyros, fibre optics gyros, accelerometers, etc.), packaged into Attitude and Heading Reference Systems (AHRS) or into Inertial Navigation Systems (INS). Although AHRS/INS technologies are well established, they have some disadvantages. High accuracy class products are costly when compared with emerging alternative technologies (e.g. MEMS based Inertial Measurement Units), AHRS/ INS position data accuracy degrades with time and their attitude accuracy is strongly dependent on platform dynamics. Furthermore, a significant amount of data processing is required to “smooth-out” sensor errors and extensive simulation, laboratory and ground/flight test activities are often required in order to properly design and calibrate the Kalman Filter parameters. The use of inexpensive GNSS technology for aiding AHRS/INS has been extensively investigated over the past decades, and integrated GNSS/INS systems are the state-of-the-art for aerospace platform navigation applications.

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Last date updated on May, 2024