Aircraft/Missile Sensor Fusion for Enhanced Weapon Delivery

The ability to fuse data from sensors on both aircraft and weapon systems can significantly improve the accuracy of weapon delivery. NAVSYS has designed an innovative tracking system that optimally combines data from both the aircraft and missile sensors. This approach minimizes the required missile electronics while providing a highly accurate integrated GPS/INS solution for enhanced weapon delivery. The missile is installed with a low cost, miniaturized GPS sensor developed for NAVSYS, the TIDGET (tm). In the TIDGET/Inertial Missile (TIM) tracking system, the TIDGET provides periodic "snapshots" of GPS and INS data to the aircraft tracking system which optimally processes the missile data using information from both the missile and the aircraft GPS and INS sensors. This method has the following advantages for enhanced weapon delivery: low cost, miniaturized GPS sensor which requires no initialization pre-launch; rapid signal acquisition even in high dynamics (<1 sec TTFF); rapid in-flight alignment of missile INS; and improved signal tracking and accuracy through aided, differential signal processing. In Phase I, the TIM system will be defined and simulations will be performed to demonstrate the system performance for a specific mission. In Phase II, a prototype system will be built and tested.