US 5,297,052 AGranted

Integrated fault-tolerant air data inertial reference system

AssigneeThe Boeing Company

InventorsMelville D. W. McIntyre, David L. Sebring

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Abstract

A fault-tolerant air data and inertial navigation reference system utilizes skewed axis inertial sensors and fault-tolerant redundant electronics to provide higher redundancy with fewer parts. Parallelly operating processor circuits each receive the individual outputs of six skewed-axis gyros and six skewed-axis accelerometers. Each processor independently processes parity equations using the outputs to identify malfunctioning sensors. Further, the output of each processor is transmitted to three parallelly operating voter circuits. The voters are operable to discard a processor if its output does not agree with the majority. The voter outputs are similarly fed back to the processor circuits, which compare these outputs, and discard any voter whose output disagrees with the majority, thus providing a completely integrated system.

Claims10

Dependent claims

An inertial navigation reference system, comprising:

a plurality of greater than three redundant gyroscopes, any one of said gyroscopes being skewed with respect to all of the others, each gyroscope being operable to provide an output signal;
a plurality of greater than three redundant accelerometers, any one of said accelerometers being skewed with respect to all of the other accelerometers, each accelerometer also being operable to provide an output signal;
a plurality of redundant processor circuits, each being operable to receive the output signal from each one of said gyroscopes and accelerometers, and to calculate navigational reference signals therefrom, and said plurality of processor circuits operating in parallel so that all of said processor circuits receive said output signals and produce said navigational signals substantially simultaneously;
and
a plurality of redundant voter circuits, each voter circuit being operable to receive the navigational reference signals produced by each one of said processor circuits, and to output said navigational reference signals from at least one of said processor circuits to an avionics bus, said plurality of voter circuits operating in parallel so that all of said voter circuits receive said navigational signals from all said processor circuits substantially simultaneously, and further, each voter circuit being further operable to discard the navigational reference signals of a malfunctioning processor circuit;
and
wherein each processor circuit is further operable to discard the output signal of a malfunctioning gyroscope or accelerometer, and each processor circuit is still further operable to monitor the output of all of said voter circuits, and to discard the output of a malfunctioning voter circuit.

4 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.