Integration of GNSS and INS with a phased array antenna

High attenuation, blockage and severe multipath fading in urban environments, under dense canopy or jamming attacks degrade accuracy, continuity, availability and integrity of GNSS services. GNSS/INS integration and antenna array beamforming approaches both provide certain levels of protection against these challenging circumstances in different ways and are studied in the literature; however, their combination of them has received less attention. This research studies different strategies to combine a GNSS antenna array with an inertial navigation system. The focus is on the integration of ultra-tight and tightly coupled GNSS/INS with a distortionless GNSS beamformer. It is shown that a tighter integration of a phase array antenna with INS and GNSS not only has all the benefits of array processing and INS in dealing with challenging environments, but also can provide external information for attitude parameters, and therefore, the overall performance of the integrated system is improved. To verify the applicability of the integrated system and to evaluate its performance, two sets of data have been collected and analyzed.