Gravity Modeling for Precise Terrestrial Inertial Navigation
Abstract
A historical perspective of gravity modeling for terrestrial navigation is presented. The traditional ellipsoidal model is explained, and the consequent errors are discussed. The propagation of these errors into navigation estimation errors is presented. A brief survey of advanced modeling methods and the pertinent theory is presented. The system design problem of selecting an advanced gravity model is presented as a scenario to motivate the proposed research. To address this problem, a new theoretical analysis technique is developed. This technique includes the effects of navigation error propagation, the statistics of the anomalous field (the residual after ellipsoidal or other reference field modeling), the statistics of gravity survey errors, and the advanced gravity modeling. These effects are combined to yield a measure of system performance cost as reflected in the navigation error state covariance due to gravity modeling errors acting alone. This report contains references to 82 items in the open literature pertinent to this subject area.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 1977
- Accession Number
- ADA042419
Entities
People
- Robert M. Edwards
Organizations
- Air Force Institute of Technology