Optimising the integration of terrain referenced navigation with INS and GPS

The benefits of integrated INS/GPS systems are well known. However, the knowledge required to jam GPS is becoming public and the hardware to achieve this is basic. When GPS data are unavailable and a low grade INS is used, navigation accuracy quickly degrades to an unacceptable level. The addition of one or more terrain referenced navigation (TRN) systems to an integrated INS/GPS navigation system enables the INS to be calibrated during GPS outages, increasing the robustness of the overall navigation solution. TRN techniques are compared and integration architectures are reviewed. For the initial studies of INS/GPS/TRN integration, radar altimeter based terrain contour navigation (TCN) with a batch processing algorithm is used in conjunction with a centralised integration filter. Four different approaches for using these TCN fixes to calibrate the INS are compared. These are a best fix method, a weighted fix method using a probabilistic data association filter (PDAF) and single and multi-hypothesis versions of the Iterative Gaussian Mixture Approximation of the Posterior (IGMAP) method. Simulation results are presented showing that the single hypothesis IGMAP technique offers the best balance between accuracy, robustness and processing efficiency.