Precise Ship-Relative Navigation System Based on Galileo Pseudolites

摘要

Landing aircraft on ships impose stringent requirements to navigation for both manned and unmanned aircraft. The report at hand proposes an innovative navigation system, capable of the requirements for precise, relative navigation. As a special feature, this system is able to determine not only the current relative position between ship and aircraft, but also their relative attitude and relative velocities without the need of a shipboard Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). This keeps the system as simple as possible and simultaneously omits an additional source of error. The determination of the ship's attitude and motion is important to identify whether a landing is currently possible or not, but only the knowledge of the relative velocities allows an estimation whether the ship motion is too severe for a safe completion of the landing. The paper gives an overview of various systems for the purpose of ship-relative navigation, which have been proposed in the recent years, followed by a description of the proposed system design. After that, the dependency of the achievable accuracies is explained and some special features of the used algorithms and simulation results of the position and motion estimation are discussed. The last section of the paper gives a conclusion and outlook on our future work.