Polyhedral GPS receiver system for attitude determination

A novel three-axis attitude determination technique using the Global Positioning System (GPS) is presented. This technique calculates the attitude of an object, such as a motor vehicle or an aircraft, by using a new configuration of GPS antennas in three dimensions, where a GPS antenna is placed at each vertex of a polyhedron. Polyhedra (tetrahedron, octahedron, and icosahedron), which have regular triangular faces, are particularly suitable for this type of GPS-based attitude determination. An optimal method of data processing for measuring an object´s attitude was developed that exploits all the information from the measurements detected by the GPS receivers. Since the computational complexity of the optimal method is not acceptable from the practical point of view, a reduced-complexity method that uses part of the measurements was also developed. The application of GPS-based attitude determination to a helicopter satellite communication system for disasters is presented.