Combating GNSS Interference with Advanced Inertial Integration

There are many scenarios where an integrated INS/GNSS navigation system may be required to operate in a high interference or weak signal environment. The GPS receiver may exploit the inertial aiding by operating with narrow tracking loop bandwidths in order to increase interference resistance. However, where a low grade INS is used, wider bandwidths are desirable to calibrate the INS errors effectively. This is important for GPS tracking loop aiding and sole-means inertial navigation during jamming. To obtain both effective INS calibration and jamming resistance, an adaptive tightly-coupled (ATC) INS/GPS integration architecture has been developed. The ATC technique has been assessed by simulation, showing that it provides a significant anti-jam margin over an INS/GPS with fixed tracking bandwidths selected for INS calibration. Compared to the deep (or ultra-tightly-coupled) integration techniques currently under development, ATC is a low cost anti-jam integration technique as it does not require a complete re-design of the navigation architecture. When there is too much interference for any GNSS signals to be tracked, the INS provides sole-means navigation. Thus, it is important to optimise the calibration of the INS when GNSS signals are available. To this end, the effects of estimating higher order inertial instrument errors and satellite range biases within the INS/GPS integration filter have been assessed.