Hybridization of GNSS Receivers with INS Systems for Terrestrial Applications in Airport Environment

Abstract

This paper deals with the study of low-cost efficient techniques of GNSS-INS integration for the realization of a surveillance system for the terrestrial vehicular traffic in an airport. This system will have to enable accurate, continuous and reliable tracking of each ground vehicle operating in airport area in support of maintenance and management of aircrafts. High accuracies are required to give the ground control a precise and dynamic view of the airport situation, in order to optimize the ATM (Air Traffic Management) activity; this is particularly important in large hubs. In order to integrate satellites and sensors measurements we relied on Kalman filtering, a powerful signal processing tool for optimal blending of heterogeneous data sources. Specifically, we used an integration architecture named tightly coupled, where only one Kalman filter is used to integrate pseudorange, Doppler and sensor measurements. We will show that our hybrid receiver is a rather simple but extremely efficient solution to this problem.