A Low-Cost, High-Precision Navigator for Unmanned Aircraft

Toyon Research Corporation proposes to develop a low-cost navigation system for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that achieves an attitude accuracy of better than 0.1 degrees using commercial-grade gyroscopes and accelerometers. An order of magnitude improvement in navigation performance will be achieved by fusing low-cost inertial sensor measurements with attitude and position measurements from a small-aperture GPS-based attitude (GPS/A) sensor. The Miniature Integrated Direction-finding Attitude-determining Anti-jam System (MIDAAS(TM)) obtains position, velocity, attitude, and time (PVAT) measurements directly from GPS signals. MIDAAS employs an innovative small single-aperture antenna to compute full 3-D attitude (roll, pitch and yaw) using only two RF channels, leading to a smaller, simpler, lower-cost GPS/A receiver system. A stand-alone (gyro-less) MIDAAS unit can also be used to provide attitude information in addition to position and velocity on very small platforms. A unique ultra-tightly coupled (UTC) navigation architecture makes the system inherently more robust to interference and significantly improves the attitude estimate. In addition, MIDAAS provides active anti-jam protection and multipath mitigation thereby further improving the system integrity and robustness. The system performance will be demonstrated during the Phase I effort with data obtained during several flight tests, and will be compared with a higher-accuracy, more expensive GPS/IMU system.

The MIDAAS GPS-based attitude (GPS/A) sensor technology and inertial navigation system (INS) is applicable to a wide range of military and civilian applications including manned and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), micro air vehicles (MAVs), unattended ground sensors (UGS), handheld positioning units, recreational/virtual reality orienting devices, radio-controlled (RC) vehicles, ground vehicles, and far-target locators (FTL). The technology appeals to customers who desire robust position and attitude measurements for platforms that have stringent cost and size, weight and power (SWAP) constraints. The gyro-less system can also provide accurate attitude measurements for spin-stabilized projectiles and launch systems with roll rates as high as 300 Hz.

Integrating MIDAAS with a commercial-grade inertial measurement unit (IMU) will provide better than tactical-grade navigation accuracies at a low-cost, which in turn will enable highly accurate UAV platform attitude control with corresponding science payload instrument stability and pointing accuracy. This low-power novel navigation system will satisfy the size, weight and power (SWAP) constraints of most civilian and military small-scale remotely operated vehicles and unmanned systems. Furthermore, the improved attitude accuracy of the navigation system will enable precision flight control for highly repeatable terrain monitoring. The GPS/A technology is also applicable to spin-stabilized platforms such as sounding rockets. Furthermore, the anti-jam (AJ) GPS architecture improves the robustness of the system against unintentional and intentional interference thereby improving the probability of successfully completing each mission.

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