GNSS Only Reduced Navigation System Performance Evaluation for High-Speed Smart Projectile Attitudes Estimation

One of the critical tasks for high-speed projectile is accurate attitude determination. The challenge in this task comes from the restrictions imposed, like, computational resources, available power, limited space, and limited budget. Usually INS / GNSS integration is utilized for that purpose, but for an INS to be applicable for that task it is required to be high-end INS, which will require more space, and will be over budget, in addition to export restrictions which makes high-end IMU not a valid solution. So, this paper assesses the ability to determine two of the three required attitudes (pitch and heading) in the navigation states using only GNSS system, without incorporating any other external sensor. A data for two high-speed projectile scenarios were generated using IMUS (GNSS and Inertial Simulator) Software, each scenario was repeated multiple times with different GNSS accuracy. Then the attitude mathematical algorithm was implemented on MATLAB for evaluation and assessments of the experiments. Results revealed the ability of the proposed approach to estimate the pitch and heading angle using GNSS system only with acceptable accuracy for different scenarios including various GNSS data rates and position uncertainties as well.