MINS-B II: a marine integrated navigation system

A low-cost navigation system integrator has been developed for the Canadian Navy. This system, AN/SYN-501 (MINS-B II), uses a 17-state, dynamically reconfigurable extended Kalman filter, along with extensive error detection and correction algorithms. Designed to improve the navigation accuracy, efficiency, and reliability onboard major ocean-going vessels, this system optimally integrates most standard marine navigation sensors and systems: GPS (Global Positioning System), Transit, Omega, Loran-C, Gyrocompass, Speedlog and operator-entered sextant measurements or position fixes. The MINS is designed to be very flexible, with microprocessor-controlled interfaces to collect sensor input from a wide variety of brands and models of these systems and sensors. The integration software has comprehensive failure-mode capability, allowing operation with any viable subset of these inputs. The author briefly describes the salient points of the MINS integration scheme and presents some recent sea-trial results