Geophysical inertial navigation system
AssigneeMLHO, Inc.
InventorAlan Alexander Burns
Life of this patent
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Abstract
An inertial navigation system employs geophysical (earth's magnetic and gravity) field sensors to measure body rotations of an aircraft or other vehicle. In effect, these replace expensive laser ring gyros used in conventional inertial navigation systems. The vector components of the geomagnetic field may be incorporated directly into the state vector describing the vehicle's attitude, acceleration, velocity, and position. A predictive filter (e.g. Kalman) operates on measured and predicted geophysical field components and on-board accelerometers. Predicted geophysical field components are obtained from maps and/or models of the earth's magnetic and gravity fields.
Claims14
A system for inertial navigation of a vehicle comprising
- a. a means for measuring vector components of a geophysical field;
- b. a means for measuring vector components of the acceleration of said vehicle;
- c. a means for inertial navigation having as output the geographical position, velocity, and attitude of said vehicle and employing a predictive filter using as inputs:
- i. changes in said measured vector geophysical field components;
- ii. changes in predicted vector geophysical field components;
- iii. said vector components of said vehicle acceleration.
- d. a means for employing said geographical position and attitude output of said inertial navigation means to calculate said predicted geophysical field components from descriptive geophysical field data.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.