Marine Inertial Navigation Into the 21st Century and Beyond

George Ramirez, Peter Kabat

Abstract:	The U.S. Navy and other navies of the world have made a considerable investment in the integration of marine inertial navigators with other shipboard equipments. In- tegration involves both hardware and software. The hardware includes the various interconnected equip- ments such as the inertial system, a GPS receiver and the ship’s cabling required to interface these equipments. The software consists of two major functional elements: communications or I/O and navigation data processing. The shipboard integration process, using Litton’s WSN-5 or LSN-500 series of inertial navigators has been a continuous process for the last decade. The process has been carefully controlled in order to retain the form, fit and functional capabilities of the inertial navigation system, and to retain compatibility so that integration problems are minimized. This paper describes two of the latest system modifica- tions which exemplify the evolutionary redesign ap- proach. The first of these is a redesign of the inertial measurement unit (IMU) using ring laser gyros to replace the spinning wheel gyros used in the current system. The second change describes the addition of eight Low Level Serial I/O ports. The advantages of the changes and the user transparency and compatibility with earlier versions of the inertial navigator are also discussed.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1990) June 26 - 28, 1990 Atlantic City, NJ
Pages:	89 - 98
Cite this article:	Ramirez, George, Kabat, Peter, "Marine Inertial Navigation Into the 21st Century and Beyond," Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1990), Atlantic City, NJ, June 1990, pp. 89-98.
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