Design and integration of a compact common miniature environment-insensitive navigation module for unmanned vehicles

Abstract

A common miniature environment-insensitive navigation module which not only can provide the accurate position through different environment but also can easily be configured to adapt to the different type of unmanned vehicles is proposed in this paper. The module prototype is composed of a integrated MEMS inertial navigation unit using MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes, a hard aluminum module structure with rubber isolator, a series of sensor interface of magnetometer, embedded GPS receiver, infrared sensor, vision camera, radio frequency communication etc and a FPGA based central control and navigation calculation circuit. The fabricated MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes can resist high-g shock and have temperature drift compensation. The structure of the module uses hard aluminum with finite element analysis to find the appropriate position for sensors. All sensors without antenna are packaged in the structure with moisture, heat isolation and rubber isolator. The navigation computation scheme use the status of connected sensors to choose appropriate algorithm function to compute the navigation output. FPGA is used to be the main control and process unit of this module. Algorithms are embedded in the FPGA using the DSP core. The multiply interfaces to other sensor are implemented using the flexible configuration of the FPGA and peripheral. The conclusions are reached at last.