A Flexible Federated Navigation System for Next Generation Military Aircraft

Alexander S. Hamilton and Brian W. Chilton

Abstract:	The potential for precise and robust navigation systems in military aircraft has increased dramatically over recent years. Unfortunately, retrofitting such enhancements into the more complex weapon systems has been a problem and has generally only been achieved during a major update programmes. For next generation systems it will be advantageous to adopt a more flexible approach which will enable different sensor and systems requirements to be catered for by simply reconfiguring a common system architecture. This will allow such aspects as new technology and differing customer requirements to be included with minimal impact on the navigation systems design. An integration method / system has been developed by British Aerospace, Military Aircraft Division, which will enable such an approach to be adopted. An early prototype INS/GPS/TRN system utilising VME backplane technology and off-the-shelf navigation sensors (Collins MAGRS & GEM I receivers, Honeywell H423 inertial navigation system and Sperry radar altimeter) has flown successfully in flight trials and demonstrated the capability of such an approach. The system utilises a flexible method of combining multiple navigation sensors using INS calibrating Kalman filters. It is based on the federated information sharing approach suggested by Neal Carlson with extensions to reduce the amount of modification / rework required. The desired flexibility is achieved by removing the sensor specific states from the local filter state vectors before combination. When the combined state is fed back to the local filters the sensor specific states are recalculated using the local state vector and state covariance correlation.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1996) June 19 - 21, 1996 Royal Sonesta Hotel Cambridge, MA
Pages:	409 - 415
Cite this article:	Hamilton, Alexander S., Chilton, Brian W., "A Flexible Federated Navigation System for Next Generation Military Aircraft," Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1996), Cambridge, MA, June 1996, pp. 409-415.
Full Paper:	ION Members/Non-Members: 1 Download Credit Sign In