Online Health Monitoring of Simplex Inertial Navigation System of a High Performance Aircraft

This paper presents an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) based autonomous estimation technique to compute inertial velocities and attitudes of a fighter aircraft by fusing data from its linear acceleration sensors, rotation rate sensors and calibrated air data sensors. This technique is developed to monitor the health of signals from a simplex Inertial Navigation System (INS) installed on a high performance aircraft. Results using flight test data show good accuracy achieved for the computed parameters with respect to those obtained from a highly sophisticated GPS based INS.