System for determining the heading and/or attitude of a body

Abstract

A system for determining the heading and / or attitude of a body receives radio waves from a plurality of position-fixing satellites using at least three antennas fixedly mounted at different positions of the body. To reliably obtain integer ambiguity solutions of carrier phases of the radio waves in a shorter time, the system directly determines integer ambiguities from attitude angle data obtained by an IMU attitude processing section when the integer ambiguities are to be redetermined in the event of an interruption of the received radio waves or a change in the combination of satellites to be used. This system provides a user with highly accurate uninterrupted heading and / or attitude angle information.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION AND RELATED ART STATEMENT[0001] The present invention relates to a system for determining the heading and / or attitude of a body moving or stationary, such as an aircraft or a vessel.[0002] There is being developed an attitude determining system (ADS) which receives radio waves transmitted from a plurality of position-fixing satellites by a plurality of antennas disposed at specific positions of a body with one of the antennas being used as a reference antenna, measures the phases of carrier signals of the radio waves, determines the relative geometric relationship of the onboard antennas by determining the relative positions of the antennas with respect to the reference antenna, and thereby measures the three-dimensional attitude of the body.[0003] Another example of a conventional system for determining the attitude of a body utilizes an inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor like a rate gyro which detects angular velocity.[0004] The conventional ADS det...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0011] Another object of the invention is to provide a measuring system which can obtain an integer ambiguity based on an output of an IMU sensor.

[0012] The present invention makes it possible to determine integer ambiguities of single differences of carrier phase or double differences of carrier phase observed when determining relative positions of multiple antennas based on attitude angles of a body obtained by means of an IMU sensor to thereby shorten the time required for obtaining an integer ambiguity solution, so that attitude determining results can be continuously output to a user even if cycle slips frequently occur.

[0018] Since the integer ambiguities of the single differences of carrier phase or the double differences of carrier phase observed when calculating the relative positions of the multiple antennas are directly determined from the attitude angles of the body obtained by means of the IMU sensor in this invention, it is possible to output attitude information to the user substantially without interruption even when the combination of satellites to be used is altered or a cycle slip has occurred. Furthermore, it becomes possible to output highly reliable attitude information because the rate of correct integer ambiguity solutions increases.

Problems solved by technology

In the conventional integer ambiguity solution method, however, there arise errors in solution statistically and stochastically with the probability of finding a correct integer ambiguity solution being 85% to 95%, for example, wherein the time required for obtaining the integer ambiguity solution greatly depends on observation noise level and baseline lengths (i.e., the lengths between the reference antenna and the other antennas whose relative positions should be determined).

Under an ordinary noise level, 30 seconds to a few minutes are required on average to obtain an integer ambiguity solution when the baseline lengths are approximately 1 m. When the noise level is high, it has occasionally be impossible to obtain an integer ambiguity solution even after 10 minutes of observation, for example.

In practical situations, it becomes necessary to obtain integer ambiguity solutions when the combination of satellites used for position fix is altered or when a cycle slip (a situation in which information on integer components of a value in a counter for counting the carrier phases is lost due to inability of a coherent delay lock loop of a carrier reconstruction circuit to track) occurs due to noise, for example.

Therefore, if the time for determining the integer ambiguity solution is long, an attitude output for a user would be frequently interrupted for impermissibly long periods of time.

Also, if the rate of correct integer ambiguity solutions is low, the system would output unreliable attitude information.

This has been a major bottleneck for practical application of the conventional ADS.

In an attitude determining system using the aforementioned IMU sensor, on the other hand, a major problem has been the accumulation of errors which occurs due to the fact that the system determines the three-dimensional attitude of a body by integrating its angular velocity components in the direction of each of three axes x, y, z.

When a widely available low-cost IMU sensor is used in a system for determining the attitude of a body by means of the IMU sensor, however, significant errors would occur, making it impossible to perform accurate error modeling.

Therefore, even if the IMU sensor error is estimated and compensated for, it can not be completely removed.

This means that the ADS should restore an reliable attitude data output within this backup time, so that the conventional ADS / IMU integrated system has not been suited for practical use.

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