Inertial+, the Once and Future Navigation System
Channel: IEEE Buenaventura Section
Date: 2022-08-21

Speaker: Michael S. Braasch, IEEE AESS Distinguished Lecturer

Since their invention shortly after World War II, inertial navigation systems have proven to be indispensable in the aerospace industry. They are immune to jamming and provide position, velocity and attitude with low noise, high data rates and low data latencies. Since the 1960s, the long-term drift inherent in any inertial system has typically been corrected through the integration of an external aiding source via an extended Kalman filter. Aiding sources have varied over the decades and, although GNSS is currently the most popular choice, the future of navigation can be characterized simply as “inertial-plus.”  Plus what?  Whatever the best aiding source happens to be. Vision? Electro-optics?  LADAR?  Signals-of-opportunity?  Maybe all of the above. In this lecture we will review the key operating principles of inertial navigation and will highlight the major error characteristics. The primary inertial-aiding design architectures will then be discussed along with performance considerations.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Michael Braasch holds the Thomas Professorship in the Ohio University School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and is a Principal Investigator with the Ohio University Avionics Engineering Center. He has been performing navigation system research for over 35 years and has served as a technical advisor both to the U.S. FAA and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Mike has taught inertial navigation short courses at all three of the U.S. manufacturers of navigation-grade inertial systems (Honeywell, Kearfott and Northrop Grumman) and served on the RTCA working group that developed standards for civil aviation applications of GNSS-aided inertial navigation.