Tightly-Coupled GPS/UWB-Ranging for Relative Navigation During Formation Flight

Jason N. Gross and Yu Gu, Brandon Dewberry

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	This paper considers tightly-coupled fusion of differential GPS (DGPS) and Impulse Radio Ultra-Wideband (IR-UWB) peer-to-peer ranging for the application of relative navigation of aircraft in close formation-flight. A simulation environment is developed and used to evaluate dynamic baseline estimation performance under various conditions including: varying multipath intensity, occurrence of phase breaks, IR-UWB measurement noise and time-lag with respect to GPS. The incorporation of IR-UWB ranging is shown to offer improved 3-D relative positioning accuracy and robustness when faced with these common errors. Two formulations are presented and compared with and without the IR-UWB ranging source, including fixing integer phase biases with the Least-squares AMBiguity Decorre-lation Adjustment (LAMBDA) method, and a differential method that does not require bias fixing and instead time differences two single-difference observations to eliminate phase ambiguities. In addition, trade-offs of integrating the IR-UWB with respect to measurement rate, communication throughput, and maximum distance are also presented. Potential applications of this technology are those that require accurate and robust relative navigation, including: cooperative remote sensing, distributed synthetic aperture radar, aircraft formation flight for fuel saving, collision avoidance, and aircraft traffic management, as well as extensions to ground (e.g. driverless cars) applications.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 27th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2014) September 8 - 12, 2014 Tampa Convention Center Tampa, Florida
Pages:	1698 - 1708
Cite this article:	Gross, Jason N., Gu, Yu, Dewberry, Brandon, "Tightly-Coupled GPS/UWB-Ranging for Relative Navigation During Formation Flight," Proceedings of the 27th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2014), Tampa, Florida, September 2014, pp. 1698-1708.
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