Precision Geo-Location for Turreted Electro-Optic Sensors

Innovations & Prototype Engineering (IPE) has developed a concept for transfer aligning two coordinate frames using what can be described as delta-quaternions. These delta-quaternions can be generated using vectors of almost any quantity that can be characterized in each of the two coordinate frames. Examples of these vector quantities are inertial linear acceleration, inertial angular rate, and inertial line of sight. These delta-quaternions can be filtered to find a transformation matrix so that any vector defined in one of the two coordinate frames can be readily expressed in the other. The phase I effort focused on characterizing the current absolute pointing error of representative EO/IR systems. The performance improvement of the low impact method using the delta-quaternions for transfer alignment was characterized. The phase II statement of work will include the implementation of IPE developed transfer alignment techniques in software and demonstrating geo-position performance. Using government-furnished information (GFI) sensor and aircraft data, IPE will demonstrate performance of the algorithms in non-real-time using Matlab as well as real time using a real time processor. IPE will provide hardware that can provide real-time demonstration of geo-position performance using a real time aircraft motion simulator and gimbal simulator, recorded aircraft state vector and sensor data, or it can be integrated with an existing aircraft's EO sensor and inertial navigation system and tested in flight.