Development of gravity gradient referenced navigation and its horizontal accuracy analysis

Recently, researches on DBRN(DataBase Referenced Navigation) system are being carried out to replace GNSS(Global Navigation Satellite System), as weaknesses of GNSS were found that are caused by the intentional interference and the jamming of the satellite signal. This paper describes the gravity gradient modeling and the construction of EKF(Extended Kalman Filter) based GGRN(Gravity Gradient Referenced Navigation). To analyze the performance of GGRN, fourteen flight trajectories were made for simulations over whole South Korea. During the simulations, we considered the errors in both DB(DataBase) and sensor as well as the flight altitudes. Accurate performances were found, when errors in the DB and the sensor are small and they located at lower altitude. For comparative evaluation, the traditional TRN(Terrain Referenced Navigation) was also developed and performances were analyzed relative to those from the GGRN. In fact, most of GGRN performed better in low altitude, but both of precise gravity gradient DB and gradiometer were required to obtain similar level of precisions at the high altitude. In the future, additional tests and evaluations on the GGRN need to be performed to investigate on more factors such as DB resolution, flight speed, and the update rate.