High-integrity navigation: a frequency-domain approach

This paper seeks to provide an autonomous navigation systems engineer with the tools and insights needed to design a high-integrity navigation system. A navigation system is said to have high integrity if a guarantee is provided that while individual components may fail, the system as a whole will never fail in a catastrophic manner, and therefore will not require any human intervention. Without the guarantee of integrity, autonomous navigation systems will be difficult, if not impossible, to deploy in real-world applications. This paper aims to provide this guarantee by determining the necessary conditions that are required for a navigation system to be considered of high integrity. Frequency-domain techniques are used to model the contribution of sensor and process faults to navigation system performance. This methodology provides the foundation needed to design navigation systems with enough frequency redundant information to make possible reliable fault detection and identification over the entire operating frequency spectrum.