An advanced system for performance evaluation of integrated navigation systems

This paper focuses on a prototypical test system aimed at estimating field performance of integrated aircraft navigation systems. Assumed design requirements for the navigation system are cm-level positioning accuracy and absolute attitude estimation error in dynamic conditions of the order of 0.1° at most. Since performance estimation does not require real time operation, the test system is based on off- line data processing and analysis. It implements the concept of GPS-aided inertial navigation making use of 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 as in the case of Real Time Kinematic implementations. System architecture and the adopted algorithms are described in the paper, and the results from first experimental tests are discussed. Though obtained in ground tests by means of a partial test setup, they show the potential of the proposed approach.