A high integrity navigation architecture for outdoor autonomous vehicles

This paper describes the design of a high integrity navigation system for use in large autonomous mobile vehicles. A frequency domain model of sensor contributions to navigation system performance is used to study the performance of a conventional navigation loop. On the basis of this, a new navigation system structure is introduced which is capable of detecting faults in any combination of navigation sensors. A decentralised architecture is also presented for the fusion of information from different asynchronous sources. An example implementation of these principles is described which employs a twin GPS/inertial navigation system and a millimeter wave radar/encoder navigation loop. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.