GPS/IMU Error Analysis for Airborne SAR Remote Sensing

L.J. Harcke, R.M. Ueberschaer, J.W. Sinko, and J.M. Strus

Abstract:	We report on simulated integration of a tactical grade inertial measurement unit (IMU) with a differential GPS receiver for airborne real-time synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging at ultra high frequencies (UHF or P-band). Ten scenarios were investigated for cases simulating characteristics of both differential GPS and IMU errors. Types of errors included 3-D Gaussian position error, Markov random walk errors, simple track offset biases, ramp offsets, and step-function biases. We confirm previous results that positioning errors affect SAR image formation through an increase in peak and/or integrated sidelobe errors, while biases due to satellite outages and/or IMU integration error affect geolocation accuracy. We conclude that the wavelength is long enough at UHF radar frequencies to enable a tactical grade IMU to be substituted for the navigation grade IMU typically employed in higher frequency microwave SAR systems.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 20th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2007) September 25 - 28, 2007 Fort Worth Convention Center Fort Worth, TX
Pages:	1631 - 1635
Cite this article:	Harcke, L.J., Ueberschaer, R.M., Sinko, J.W., Strus, J.M., "GPS/IMU Error Analysis for Airborne SAR Remote Sensing," Proceedings of the 20th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2007), Fort Worth, TX, September 2007, pp. 1631-1635.
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