A Dual Inertial Integrated Navigation System

Christopher McMillan, Jeffery S. Bird, Dale A.G. Arden

Abstract:	A Dual Inertial Integrated Navigation System (DENS) is being developed for the Canadian Navy. It is designed to improve the navigational reliability and accuracy on vessels which have two inertial navigators plus other aiding sensors such as GPS, Loran-C, Omega, Doppler Speed Log(s) and so on. The sensor integration architecture being developed is an “hierarchic alliance” of Kalman filters. This is a systematic structure of dynamically selected parallel filters. It can provide sensitive error compensation and an additional level of fault detection isolation and reconfiguration (FDIR) beyond that available to individual filters. This architecture provides significant advantages over both the conventional unifilter approach and the “federated” (or cascaded) filter approach. The primary motivating factor for this architecture is to improve reliability by providing optimal integration under all conditions, and in particular after the occurrence of subtle sensor or software faults. Otherwise, if such a fault were not immediately detected, it could corrupt the primary filter(s). This alliance of filters can always provide an uncorrupted optimal solution, since there will be a secondary filter which, at the time of failure, was running independently of the faulty sensor. This eliminates the usual need to “back out” of a failure which was not immediately detected and thus substantially simplifies reconjgurution in response to such a failure. The partial independence of the parallel filter sofhvare modules also facilitates the detection and isolation of sensor and soti faults by allowing an additional level of testing, using inter-filter fault detection techniques. These techniques are investigated using simulations and sea trial data.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 1993 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 20 - 22, 1993 Parc 55 Hotel San Francisco, CA
Pages:	11 - 20
Cite this article:	McMillan, Christopher, Bird, Jeffery S., Arden, Dale A.G., "A Dual Inertial Integrated Navigation System," Proceedings of the 1993 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, San Francisco, CA, January 1993, pp. 11-20.
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