Wide Area GPS/MEMS IMU/Data Link System for Trajectory Determination

The objective of this SBIR Phase I project is to develop and demonstrate an innovative Wide Area GPS/MEMS IMU/Data Link System to provide highly accurate Time-Space-Position Information (TSPI) and attitude information for the measurement of the trajectoryparameters of munitions. GPS (Global Positioning System) chipset technologies result in a quarter-size GPS receiver. MEMS (MicroElectronicMechanicalSystem) technologies make it possible to fabricate the monolithic integration of a MEMS inertial sensor withdriving, signal pickoff, and signal processing electronics. An integrated GPS chipset/MEMS IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) /Data Link microsystem provides a high performance/efficiency approach to improve dramatically performance and measurement range of aconventional tracking radar for munition tracking and scoring. This proposed solution combines the GPS chipset, MEMS IMU, advanced GPS/IMU nonlinear Kalman filtering/smoothing algorithms with a data link. In this Phase I project, the feasibility, as wellas functions, specifications, hardware architecture, algorithms and software of the proposed system will be investigated, simulated, and compared.This project will lead to an important commercial product, GPS/MEMS IMU/Data Link System, which has a widevariety of commercial applications including general aviation, spacecraft, satellites, robotics, intelligent transportation systems, etc.