By: Mr. Jack Richman, Adjunct Professor, NJIT
Time: 5:00-6:00 PM, Wednesday, December 8th, 2004
Place: Room 202, ECE Center, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Newark NJ. Directions

Abstract

Modern navigation is the process of accurately determining the continuous position, velocity, and attitude of a moving vehicle with respect to a reference coordinate frame. Inertial components (accelerometers and gyroscopes) provide continuous acceleration and angular rate information with respect to an inertial coordinate frame.  Processing of this data produces continuous position, velocity and attitude of the vehicle with respect to a reference navigation coordinate frame.  Since inertial component errors tend to degrade performance over time, the navigation system must be aided with occasional data from other external sources to maintain the overall accuracy. This approach is known as “aided inertial navigation” and it has received much attention and technical effort. This talk is aimed at a general engineering/technology audience and covers the following key topics:

• Inertial Components.
• The processing of the inertial component data to form an Inertial Measuring Unit (IMU).
• The errors associated with an “un-aided” IMU.
• The Global Positioning System (GPS)
• Optimally combining discrete GPS data with continuous IMU data via a Kalman filter to form a GPS aided IMU.
  

Biography

Jack Richman is an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at NJIT and had been an Adjunct Professor at Polytechnic University of New York for a number of years.  He is a part time employee of the Applied Research Laboratory of Penn State University and a full time consultant to BAE Systems Corporation, an international aerospace company whose products include communication, navigation and identification systems. Prior to this Jack Richman was a Principal Scientist at the Kearfott Guidance & Navigation Corporation for 35 years where had worked in the areas of inertial navigation, modern control theory and optimal statistical filtering.  He is the author or coauthor of numerous papers on these subjects and holds a U.S patent for a novel navigation system.

For Further information: Contact Professor Timothy Chang (973)596-3519, changtn@njit.edu.