NAVIGATION MANAGEMENT: THE INTEGRATION OF MULTIPLE SENSOR SYSTEMS

Loren A. DeGroot and William L. Polhemus

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	HISTORICALLY, THE NAVIGATION of a civiltransport aircraft has been the responsibility of a specialist crew member. In the performance of his assigned task, the navigat’or has applied a complex set of mathematical and intuit,ive procedures by which he made navigational information useful. Now, because of increased accuracy requirements and of economic considerations, it is becoming apparent that the job of the navigator must become an automated task. An improved navigation which meets present and future operational constraints does not lie in the development and implementation of more navigational sensors. While this approach may provide an equitable solution in the future, it,s present contribution would serve only to further burden crew members who are already functioning at or near their limit. Jnstead, the problem must be approached with the view of optimizing the tasks of a crew member who will “manage” the navigation systems as a collat’eral duty. This descrives a systems approach which combines human experience and logic with computer technology to implement automatically the navigation management functions. It is generally acknowledged that, in the foreseeable future, no single navigation aid will satisfy all operational requirements. As a result, navigation systems must recognize the use of a number of independent and dissimilar sensors. These individual sensors must be organized into an integrated system through the utilization of a navigation management unit. Today, this unit is a specialist navigation officer-tomorrow it will be an electronic computer.
Published in:	NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation, Volume 14, Number 3
Pages:	285 - 294
Cite this article:	DeGroot, Loren A., Polhemus, William L., "NAVIGATION MANAGEMENT: THE INTEGRATION OF MULTIPLE SENSOR SYSTEMS", NAVIGATION: Journal of The Institute of Navigation, Vol. 14, No. 3, Fall 1967, pp. 285-294.
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