A Study on Attitude Heading Reference System Based Micro Machined Electro Mechanical System for Small Military Unmanned Underwater Vehicle

Generally, underwater unmanned vehicle have adopted an inertial navigation system (INS), dead reckoning (DR), acoustic navigation and geophysical navigation techniques as the navigation method because GPS does not work in deep underwater environment. Even if the tactical inertial sensor can provide very detail measurement during long operation time, it is not suitable to use the tactical inertial sensor for small size and low cost UUV because the tactical inertial sensor is expensive and large. One alternative to INS is attitude heading reference system (AHRS) with the micro-machined electro mechanical system (MEMS) inertial sensor because of MEMS inertial sensor's small size and low power requirement. A cost effective and small size attitude heading reference system (AHRS) which incorporates measurements from 3-axis micro-machined electro mechanical system (MEMS) gyroscopes, accelerometers, and 3-axis magnetometers has been developed to provide a complete attitude solution for UUV. The AHRS based MEMS overcome many problems that have inhibited the adoption of inertial system for small UUV such as cost, size and power consumption. Several evaluation experiments were carried out for the validation of the developed AHRS's function and these experiments results are presented. Experiments results prove the fact that the developed MEMS AHRS satisfied the required specification.