The concept of navigation. Fixing vs. deduced reckoning. Different classes of navigation. Time and space reference
frames. Reporting navigation solution: fundamentals of cartography and geodesy. Navigation in real time vs.
trajectography. Navigation as an element of the Guidance-Control-Navigation loop. Effects of navigation accuracy on
system performance.
Satellite-based navigation. From TRANSIT (Doppler-count) to time-of-arrival systems. Required number of satellites in
view. Pseudorange, linearized solution, effects of geometry, expected budget error. GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and
Beidou systems: similarities and differences. Differential navigation and augmentation systems. From code- to carrierphase-based observables: the issue of the ambiguity in the number of cycles. Fundamentals of RTK (Real Time
Kinematics) and PPP (Precision Point Positioning) techniques. GNSS applications to land, air and space navigation.
GPS experiments with lab’s test bed.
Inertial Navigation. Stable platforms and strap-down architectures. Accelerometers and gyroscopes. MEMS sensors.
MEMS advantages and limitations. Performance of current MEMS sensors. Sensors’ tests. Calibration and Alignment.
Optical gyros. Attitude reconstruction (cosine direction matrix, Euler angles, quaternions). Mechanizations. Instability
of the gravity loop. Linearization of navigation equations’ set. Errors.
Visual-based navigation. Feature recognition and Hough transform techniques. Experiments with lab’s test bed.
Integrated navigation. Kalman filter. Proof of the optimality of the linear filter. Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) for nonlinear process and/or non-linear observations. Examples and exercises. Insights about “beyond-Kalman” modern
filtering techniques.
