GPS AIDED IMU FOR UNMANNED AIR VEHICLES

This paper presents the development of a strapdown navigation system to determine the pose (position and attitude) of unmanned air vehicles, using GPS, accelerometers, magnetometers and rate gyros triads. The current work resorts to complementary filtering to implement a navigation system developed on Earth coordinates and Euler angles. Special features include bias estimation and removal in inertial sensors. An attitude aiding device, referred to as Magneto-Pendular Sensor, is introduced and detailed. Multirate filter synthesis is outlined, and a time-varying attitude transformation is briefly discussed. The navigation system performance is evaluated in simulation using a typical model-scale helicopter maneuver.