Artillery Orientation via Distributed MEMS Inertial Sensing

"Determining the precise position, bearing and inclination of field artillery is essential for accurate fire. The rapid pace of modern warfare and the increasing efficiency of modern counterbattery methods dictates regular movement of artillery, obviatingconventional survey techniques and placing increasing emphasis on the use of internal inertial navigation systems (INS) and of GPS. Present INS systems are vulnerable to shock, and are bulky and limited in accuracy. Physical Optics Corporation proposes todevelop a novel distributed reference inertial artillery direction (DRIAD) system consisting of a distributed redundant network of MEMS inertial sensors coupled with carrier differential GPS receivers, which sense the movement and rotation of theartillery. This information is processed with data from existing sources to optimally estimate the position, bearing, and orientation of the artillery. A combination of Kalman and spatial operator algebra methods are employed for optimal fusion andtracking of the artillery. An optional detached inertial sensor will enable the system to recover rapidly from recoil transients. In Phase I, MEMS components will be selected and integrated into a preliminary sensor node design with COTS CarrierDifferential GPS modules, and evaluated with preliminary data fusion algorithms. DRIADs in Army vehicles and UGVs will provide extremely precise information on the position and more importantly the orien