A Novel Design of Fiber Optic Gyroscope Based INS System for UAS Applications

This paper describes an inertial navigation system (INS) for autonomous quad copter application, based on Fiber Optic Gyroscopes (FOG). As the FOG lack the mechanical components of the age old traditional Gyroscopes, they show good performance in terms of weight, size, sensitivity, robustness and resistance to physical forces. These characteristics make a FOG very efficient and extremely useful in strap down altitude navigational systems using heading reference. In this paper, an effort has been made to design and test run an INS based on FOG, which tries to satisfy the generic positioning requirements for typical UAS applications. The paper also cover lab-evaluations of testing the response of the system based on several test cases which also include errors owing from alignment and those induced by the sensor itself. Simulation results suggest good performance of the test system developed. Detailed results of system simulation are also reproduced. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.