A low-cost GPS/inertial attitude heading reference system (AHRS) for general aviation applications

An inexpensive Attitude Heading Reference System (AHRS) for general aviation applications is developed by fusing low cost ($20-$1000) automotive grade inertial sensors with GPS. The inertial sensor suit consists of three orthogonally mounted solid state rate gyros. GPS is used for attitude determination in a triple antenna ultra short baseline configuration. A complementary filter is used to combine the information from the inertial sensors with the attitude information derived from GPS. The inertial sensors provide attitude information at a sufficiently high bandwidth to drive an inexpensive glass-cockpit type display for pilot-in-the-loop control. The low bandwidth GPS attitude is used to calibrate the rate gyro biases on-line. Data collected during laboratory testing is used to construct error models for the inertial sensors. Analysis based on these models shows that the system can coast through momentary GPS outages lasting 2 minutes with attitude errors less than 6 degrees. Actual performance observed during ground and flight tests with GPS off was found to be substantially better than that predicted by manufacturer supplied specification sheets. Based on this, it is concluded that off-line calibration combined with GPS based in-flight calibration can dramatically improve the performance of inexpensive automotive grade inertial sensors. Data collected from flight tests indicate that some of the automotive grade inertial sensors (180 deg/hr) can perform near the low end of tactical grade (10 deg/hr) sensors for short periods of time after being calibrated on-line by GPS