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CEAS EuroGNC 2024

Navigation Algorithm for a Twin-Engine Turboprop Aircraft using an Extended Kalman Filter
Mushfiqul Alam Lecturer in Flight Dynamics, Centre for Aeronautics, School of Aerospace, Transport and Manufacturing, Cranfield University, Bedford, MK430AL, United Kingdom.
James Whidborne Professor in Control Engineering, Centre for Aeronautics, School of Aerospace, Transport and Manufacturing, Cranfield University, Bedford, MK430AL, United Kingdom.
Mark Westwood Professor in Aeronautics, Centre for Aeronautics, School of Aerospace, Transport and Manufacturing, Cranfield University, Bedford, MK430AL, United Kingdom.
Abstract:
MEMS ((micro-electro-mechanical system) based sensing technologies have garnered interest in replacing the traditionally heavy and expensive ring laser gyros and servo accelerometers used in inertial measurement unit (IMU) for obtaining position/velocity and attitude estimates. A strapdown MEMS bases IMU consists of tri-axial accelerometers (ACCs) and tri-axial angular rate sensors (ARSs) often aided with GNSS measurements. MEMS based sensors suffer from stochastic errors such as bias instability which needs to be considered during the estimation of the navigation data. This paper presents a dual stage cascaded extended Kalman filtering (EKF) framework for fusing the ACC and ARS measurement with the GNSS measurements. Additionally, vehicle true airspeed data is used for the estimation of air data such as angle of attack and sideslip. The performance of the EKF based navigation algorithm is tested using the Saab 340B twin engine turboprop aircraft operated by the Cranfield University's National Flying Laboratory Centre (NFLC). In-flight dynamic maneuvers were performed following the DO-334 - Minimum Operational Performance Standards (MOPS) for Strapdown Attitude and Heading Reference Systems (AHRS) for collecting data to assess the performance of the navigation algorithm. From the maneuvers performed, the assessment shows the performance of the attitude estimation meets the requirements in terms of ensuring accuracy.
Keywords: nonlinear navigation; extended Kalman filter; INS/GNSS sensor fusion; MEMS sensors; DO-334 standard; air data estimation
 View PDF CEAS-GNC-2024-028


Mushfiqul Alam, James Whidborne, Mark Westwood: Navigation Algorithm for a Twin-Engine Turboprop Aircraft using an Extended Kalman Filter. Proceedings of the 2024 CEAS EuroGNC conference. Bristol, UK. June 2024. CEAS-GNC-2024-028.
BibTeX entry:

@Incollection{CEAS-GNC-2024-028,
    author = {Alam, Mushfiqul and Whidborne, James and Westwood, Mark},
    title = {Navigation Algorithm for a Twin-Engine Turboprop Aircraft using an Extended Kalman Filter},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 {CEAS EuroGNC} conference},
    address = {Bristol, UK},
    month = jun,
    year = {2024},
    note = {CEAS-GNC-2024-028}
}