GINSEC - Enhanced GNSS-BF-INS Solution for Un-manned Vehicle Control

GINSEC stands for Enhanced GNSS-BF-INS Solution for Un-manned Vehicle Control.

The goal of the GINSEC project is to build a precommercial prototype of a low-cost, accurate and reliable navigation system for professional drone market. Consumer-type navigation systems work quite well in general use despite the many practical problems that still affect them. Most noticeable in vehicle navigation are the slow time to first fix (up to a few minutes), poor or no availability (outages in tunnels or dense cities), slow dynamics and poor accuracy (enough to occasionally miss an exit) and lack of a heading indication. If these problems can be annoying to an occasional user, they may be critical to professional ones, especially if operating under emergency conditions (ambulance services, fire brigades). GINSEC aims at developing a navigation system that should solve these problems with various sensor configuration and fusion approaches:

• Redundant low-cost inertial units to improve dynamics and availability of navigation, possibly using a tightly coupled approach.
• Antenna arrays, to obtain heading estimation and beamforming to attenuate multipath and interferers.
• Map-assisted navigation: map database is actively used in the navigation filter to improve accuracy over traditional (e.g. stay on road) approaches.

The GINSEC consortium consists of SMEs and RTD performers that are active in the GNSS/INS market. RTDs will mainly study and develop the data fusion algorithms for navigation, while the SMEs will develop, manufacture and test the prototype navigation system. The challenge is to implement and integrate all above technologies in the frame of limited size, weight and cost imposed by the drone market requirements. Through their collaboration, the partners aim to develop a navigation solution directly exploitable on various kinds of drones.