Development of an Integrated GPS Dual-Antenna Fixed Baseline Precision Pointing System

R. Harvey

Abstract:	An integrated sensor system using two GPS sensors, a combination tilt meter and electronic compass and a fiber-optic gyro (FOG) is developed for the purpose of determining the azimuth and pitch of a platform in post-mission. GPS and compass measurements are used in a centralized Kalman filter to estimate corrections to a nominal trajectory generated using the continuous measurements of the FOG and tilt meter. The system architecture is presented in detail. An operational test was performed in a suburban part of Calgary with a highly accurate GPS/INS on board the vehicle to form a accurate trajectory. Long term GPS outages were simulated in post mission using the same data set. The estimated performance of the system based on the filter is shown to be quite close to the true error. The integrated filter results are shown to be the same level of accuracy as a GPS-alone system with correctly resolved carrier phase integer ambiguities. The azimuth error was shown to be 0.5° while the pitch error was 1.4° at the 1s level. The integrated system offered a much higher solution availability (100%) than the GPS-system (83%) during the suburban test. For a longer term outage of 15 minutes, the integrated system was able to make use of the compass and gyro measurements to maintain a solution to about the 2° 1s level. Innovation sequence testing was used to improve the robustness of the integrated system to successfully detect incorrect ambiguity sets whereas the GPS-only system suffered from azimuth errors up to 100°.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 11th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1998) September 15 - 18, 1998 Nashville, TN
Pages:	1801 - 1810
Cite this article:	Harvey, R., "Development of an Integrated GPS Dual-Antenna Fixed Baseline Precision Pointing System," Proceedings of the 11th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1998), Nashville, TN, September 1998, pp. 1801-1810.
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