Applied particle filters in integrated aircraft navigation

Abstract: Navigation is about knowing your own position, orientation and velocity relative to some geographic entities. The sensor fusion considered in this thesis combines data from a dead reckoning system, inertial navigation system (INS), and measurements of the ground elevation. The very fast dynamics of aircraft navigation makes it difficult to estimate the true states. Instead the algorithm studied will estimate the errors of the INS and compensate for them. A height database is used along with the measurements. The height database is highly non-linear why a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter is used for the sensor fusion. This integrated navigation system only uses data from its own sensors and from the height database, which means that it is independent of information from outside the aircraft. This report will describe the algorithm and illustrate the theory used. The main purpose is to evaluate the algorithm using real flight data, why the result chapter is the most important.