Gemma: A Generic, Extensible and Modular Multi-Sensor Navigation Analysis System

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This paper presents the concept of an architecture for a system that helps researchers in the field of Geomatics to speed up their daily research on kinematic geodesy, navigation and positioning fields. The presented ideas correspond to an extensible and modular software system aimed at the development of new navigation and positioning algorithms as well as at the evaluation of the performance of sensors. The concept, already implemented in the CTTC's system GEMMA is generic and extensible. This means that it is possible to incorporate new navigation algorithms or sensors at no maintenance cost. Only the effort related to the development tasks required to either create such algorithms or model sensors needs to be taken into account. As a consequence, change poses a much smaller problem for CTTC's research activities is this specific area. This system includes several standalone tools that may be combined in different ways to accomplish various goals; that is, it may be used to perform a variety of tasks, as, for instance, (1) define positioning and navigation scenarios, (2) simulate different kinds of sensors, (3) validate new navigation algorithms or (4) evaluate the quality of an estimated navigation solution.