Dynamics & Performance of a GPS Inspired TRN Tracking Loop

Although the concept underlying Terrain Referenced Navigation (TRN) using terrain elevation data to estimate location dates back to over half a century ago, today's real-time digital signal processing capabilities enable far more advanced schemes to be implemented. There is ample potential to benefit from the advances in related signal processing applications, in particular for systems that rely on the information obtained from a tracking process in which a set of sensor measurements needs to be matched to a locally generated signal in the presence of disturbances. In earlier work, similarities between GPS code tracking and TRN elevation profile tracking have been discussed and analyzed. As a result, a novel tracking algorithm for TRN has been designed, inspired by the Delay-Locked Loop (DLL) functional principle. To increase the performance of the TRN tracker, velocity and orientation sensors were added in the system's framework. The current paper addresses the question how the integration between the velocity TRN tracking loop and the corresponding sensor measurements can be designed to provide an accurate navigation solution.