Design of a low-cost attitude determination GPS/INS integrated navigation system

Due to their complementary features of GPS and INS, the GPS/INS integrated navigation system is increasingly being used for a variety of commercial and military applications. An attitude determination GPS (ADGPS) receiver, with multiple antennas, can be more effectively integrated with a low-cost IMU since the receiver gives not only position and velocity data but also attitude data. This paper proposes a low-cost attitude determination GPS/INS integrated navigation system. The proposed navigation system comprises an ADGPS receiver, a navigation computer unit (NCU), and a low-cost commercial MEMS IMU. The navigation software includes a fault detection and isolation (FDI) algorithm for integrity. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed navigation system, two flight tests have been performed using a small aircraft. The first flight test confirmed the fundamental operation of the proposed navigation system and the effectiveness of the FDI algorithm. The second flight test evaluated the performance of the proposed navigation system and demonstrated the benefit of GPS attitude information in a high dynamic environment. The flight test results show that the proposed ADGPS/INS integrated navigation unit gives reliable navigation performance even when anomalous GPS data is provided and gives better navigation performance than a conventional GPS/INS unit.