A Fault-Tolerant Multisensor Navigation System Design

Abstract
The problem of soft-failure tolerant estimation in navigationsystems composed of multiple inertial measurement clusters and oneor more reference sensors is addressed. A new approach ispresented that achieves containment of failed sensor data, andisolates the historic good data provided by the unfailed sensors.Multiple (local) estimates are computed where the estimates areconditioned on different subsets of the sensors. A statistical overlaptest is used to determine the validity of the local estimates, and afailed sensor can be identified from analysis of the invalid localestimates. After the time of detection the most accurate estimatebased on all but the failed sensor is identified. The results areapplied to a dual-inertial/Doppler radar navigation system andsimulation results are presented.