Beacon aided attitude estimation using Angle of Arrival measurements

To improve accuracy of navigation solutions such as position, velocity and attitude etc., various navigation techniques are developed. Among them, Global Positioning System (GPS) and Inertial Navigation System (INS) are widely used in general navigation system. Additionally, in nowadays, to provide more accurate navigation solution, Extend Kalman Filter (EKF) based GPS/INS coupled system which calibrates navigation solution of INS by using GPS is proposed actively. However, in general GPS/INS coupled system, since GPS calibrates position and velocity only, the attitude cannot be calibrated directly in present GPS/INS coupled system and this feature can be vulnerable to sea environment where the attitude fluctuation occurs frequently. To complement this drawback, the angle-based attitude estimation technique using beacon is proposed in this paper. The proposed technique uses the Angle of Arrival (AoA) measurements of the received signals from array antenna and estimates the own attitude. The proposed technique is also coupled with INS and the performance of the proposed technique is shown through simulation results.