Safety critical data fusion strategies for inertial sensing on aircraft

This paper presents a data fusion system for a high performance aircraft. At the heart of the system is an extended Kalman filter which fuses data from distributed inertial sensors. The data fusion system provides high quality, high integrity data to both the flight control and navigation systems, and is consequently safety critical. The work also investigates a number of reconfiguration strategies that can be used to reconfigure the Kalman filter in the event of a sensor failure. The performance of this safety critical multi-sensor data fusion system in the event of sensor failures is evaluated through computer simulations, and same preliminary results are included