Design of Accurate Navigation System by Integrating INS and GPS modules

Abstract

Navigation has a huge application in aviation and aircraft automatic approach. Two widely used navigation systems are Global position System (GPS) and Inertial Navigation System (INS). Triangulation method used to determine the aircrafts location by GPS, speed whereas an INS, with the aid of gyroscope and accelerometer, estimates the location, velocity and alignment of an aircraft. Aircraft navigation is a complex task and using only one of the above navigation systems results in inaccurate and insufficient data. GPS stops working when satellite signal is not received, susceptible to interfere occasionally has high noise content, and has a low bandwidth, INS system requires external information for initialization has long-term drift errors. Certain errors like ionosphere interference, clock error, orbital error, position error, etc. might arise and disrupt the navigation process. In order to outrun the limitations of the above two systems and counter the errors, both INS and GPS can be integrated and used to attain more smooth, accurate and faster aircraft attitude estimates, as they have complementary strengths and limitations. GPS is stable for a long period and can act as an independent navigation system whereas INS is not susceptible to interference and signal losses has high radio bandwidth and works well for short intervals of time. In order to get accurate and precise attitude estimation, calculation of the parameters at different altitude using both systems is done; furthermore the comparison and contrast between the results is performed, measured quantities are transformed between various frames like longitudinal to rolling, calculation and elimination of errors is done producing the final solution. Because of integrated GPS and INS, the navigation system exhibits robustness, higher bandwidth, better noise characteristics, and long-term stability.