Northrop Grumman's Family of Fiberoptic based Inertial Navigation Systems

Abstract

Northrop Grumman Navigation Systems Division’s (NSD) fiber-optic gyro (FOG) based family of inertial navigation systems; LN-251, LN-260, LN-270 and LTN- 101E have demonstrated superb performance over a wide spectrum of applications ranging from high dynamic fighter aircraft, unmanned air vehicles, land vehicles and commercial aircraft. As compared to the previous generation of ring laser or mechanical gyro systems, the FOG navigation systems offer significantly smaller size, much lower weight, lower power consumption, vast improvement in life and reliability, all at the same or better level of accuracy. Using FOG technology, low noise accelerometers, high performance GPS, and sophisticated integration algorithms, NSD has demonstrated the FOG navigator’s ability to provide extremely low velocity noise information, in turn enabling improved surveillance sensor compensation and reduced target location errors. Transfer alignment techniques also permits leveraging the full accuracy of the FOG navigator to smaller remote inertial measurement units used for motion compensation or stabilization of other sensors such as radar or electro-optic pods. NSD is also in the process of adding differential GPS correction capability to provide even further enhancement of absolute positional accuracy. Using this method, radial position errors have been demonstrated to be only a few 10’s of centimeters.