Attitude, Angle of Attack and Angle of Sideslip Determination Using Carrier Phase Integer Ambiguity Estimation

Abstract

The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) positioning solution may be computed to a cm level of error, if the signal carrier phase is properly considered during the calculations. With such a precision, even attitude angles can be precisely estimated if more than one antennae is available. However, using the carrier phase information depends on solving the carrier phase integer ambiguity problem which is intrinsic to this approach. Since only a fraction of the carrier phase is observed by the GNSS receivers, the solution for the integer ambiguity is usually obtained by means of search algorithms, based on least squares. This contribution investigates the performance of the integer ambiguity solution for the attitude determination problem and also proposes a novel application: angle of attack and angle of sideslip estimation for specific aeronautical application. This novel application benefits aeronautical industry by introducing a new alternative for measuring reliable airdata parameters, namely angle of attack and angle of sideslip, by using a nonsusceptible to icing conditions data. The results presented here are based on the constrained LAMBDA method. Dynamic real data are used for evaluation of the proposed novel application.