Failure Isolation for a Minimally Redundant Inertial Sensor System

The application of two-degree-of-freedom inertial sensors in a minimally redundant strapdown configuration is considered. The potential improvement in reliability which can be achieved by exploiting the failure isolation capability unique to this configuration is evaluated. A unified, statistical approach to the detection and isolation of both hard and soft sensor failures is presented. The effectiveness of this unified approach to FDI in terms of the mean time to detection, the mean time between false alarms, and the accumulated attitude error prior to detection is indicated by simulation results.