Development of a Software Testbed for Integrated Navigation Systems

In today´s navigation systems different types of sensors are integrated. This integration may include inertial sensors, global navigation satellite systems, radar altimeter, barometric altimeter, digital terrain maps and etc. Mostly a Kalman filter is designed to fuse the sensor data and to calculate the navigation data. In order to validate and test the integration algorithm, a comprehensive software testbed has to be developed. In this paper, we develop such a testbed for integrated navigation systems where the sensor data is modeled with real time errors. Using this testbed it is possible to try different scenarios in the software environment for any navigation system whereas to test such scenarios with the hardware systems is too costly and even may be impossible. This testbed is also suitable for performing Monte-Carlo simulations and covariance analysis. A well-known terrain referenced navigation algorithm, TERCOM, is tested with this software testbed.