Jam-Resistant Global Positioning System/Inertial Navigation System (GPS/INS) Deeply-Coupled Navigation System

U.S. military transport vehicles, operating platforms, aircraft, and weapons rely upon GPS to provide position, velocity, and timing data and as an aid to the Inertial Navigation System (INS) to reduce the effects of long-term inertial sensor drift and bias. However, the use of GPS jammers as a counter-measure to block the reception of the GPS signal is relatively simple and inexpensive. Deep integration of GPS and INS offers an opportunity to improve robustness to jamming over traditional GPS/INS loose and tight coupling architectures. In the deeply coupled architecture, GPS systems use the navigation Kalman Filter to replace the GPS receiver tracking loops to greatly reduce the carrier tracking bandwidth, resulting in improved anti-jam performance. Under the Phase 1 effort, we will design, develop, and demonstrate a proof-of-concept for a deeply-coupled GPS/INS configuration, and analyze the performance against multiple scenarios. Our system will achieve high performance using a MEMS IMU, be designed to work with antenna elements that provide both nulling and/or beam-forming capability, and enable fusion with other aiding sensors, enabling improved tracking performance. This will lead directly to the Phase 2 work in which we will integrate the software with a hardware-in-the loop simulation and perform live testing.