Doppler Light Detection and Ranging-Aided Inertial Navigation and Trajectory Recovery

Abstract

A sensor fusion approach to terrain relative navigation is proposed in this paper. Sensor data from Global Position System (GPS), Inertial Navigation System (INS), and Doppler light detection and ranging (LIDAR) provide a relative state estimate through a novel multiplicative extended Kalman filter. The measurement model of the Doppler LIDAR is derived from first principals and employed by the filter to update the estimates propagated by the GPS/INS data stream. The line-of-sight Doppler velocity measurement provides direct feedback to the velocity states and improves sensitivity to these state estimates. A novel Rauch–Tung–Striebel smoother framework is derived that is compatible with states exhibiting multiplicative error that enables seamless postprocessing of state estimates filtered with a multiplicative extended Kalman filter. This new filter and smoother framework is tested with suborbital flight data from Blue Origin’s New Sheppard ascent and landing missions.