Sensability and Excitability Metrics Applied to Navigation Systems Assessment

Abstract

To evaluate the aptness of a navigation system in a particular application, the designer needs to assess its performance over typical trajectories travelled by the vehicle itself. Moreover, he or she may be required to judge which components of the kinematics state may be better estimated (and which will not). The main contributions of this work are two novel and complementary performance measures that, in concert, allow for the assessment of a navigation system within the actual context of its application over specific trajectories. For a given on board instrumental configuration, the “excitability metric” permits the isolation of the contribution of the information conveyed by the vehicle's motion itself, while, the “sensability metric” measures the resultant overall quality of the kinematics state estimation. The same tools could help the designer planning appropriate vehicles manoeuvres in order to obtain a required precision for each estimated component. While emphasis is given on the mathematical justification of those metrics, their use is also illustrated with real flight data recorded from a sounding rocket.