Customer Reviews

Aided Navigation: GPS with High Rate Sensors

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After struggling through countless articles with a myriad of approaches to fusing GPS receiver data with vehicle sensors (wheel encoders, accelerometers, gyroscopes, etc.), I started to notice how often references to work by Farrell showed up in the higher quality articles. That led me to buying his latest book, Aided Navigation.

Aided Navigation lays out Farrell's way of designing positioning systems. His designs take a subsystem formed through integration of several sensors that give good short term changes in state (e.g. position changes from inertial sensors) and aid it with one or more complimentary subsystems that do better at following the state over a longer time period (e.g. GPS receiver output.) This is a fairly classical approach, but his survey of the prerequisite theory and explanation of the finer implementation details is refreshingly well-organized.

In Part I, he builds up the analytical tools needed to rigorously execute his design methodology. It includes lots of simple examples along the way. Part II is a catalog of detailed real-world designs.

I like how the whole text coheres around derivation and demonstration of a particular design methodology. You get the feeling that he's built systems that had to work in the real world and not just on paper. Although he does outline a recipe for analyzing these sorts of systems, his theoretical depth and copious reference list saves the book from being an unthinking cookbook. It has helped me decode a lot of positioning articles I've read and given me a good 'reference trajectory' for my own design journey.

If I had to keep just two positioning references on my bookshelf, this would be one and Dan Simon's _Optimal State Estimation_ would be the other (not counting my linear algebra, physics, and calculus textbooks.)

When attempting to learn a subject like GPS-aided navigation it becomes immediately apparent that there are few references with practical, less than trivial problems and exercises to reinforce the material. This book is an exception. It contains excellent exercises and a website with down-loadable MATLAB/SIMULINK code. The text is clear and very readable.
The appendix on Euler and quaternion kinematic rate equations is quite exceptional. This book is first-rate.

I am an electrical engineer working for several navigation project. I am always struggling for long time to seek a good book on this application field. When I read several chapters of this book, I know that I found the right book. This book talks from some fundamental theory to high level application. Also it gives a lot of practical examples dedicated to navigation project. I am very happy to have this book and will use it as a guide in navigation area.

This is one of the best technical books i've ever read.

It leads the reader from deterministic and stochastic systems to optimal state estimation and navigation system design. The strong focus on practical implementation and the clear structure makes it a perfect guide for self study in this interesting topic.

This recommendable text provides the analytical tools that allow pragmatic applications of the GPS receiver output. It does not go into great detail on the functioning of the GPS, which instead it covers in some detail in the appendix and an extensive list of careful references. The text does present all the tools needed for analysis of modern navigation system design.

I have used this text (and its previous version) both in teaching coursework and in professional application. This text provides a modern approach to combining GPS with a variety of sensors, and does so using the language of applied linear algebra and its associated popular tools (typically Matlab and Simulink, examples of which are available from a dedicated site).

This text also has strong tutorial value in the application of Kalman Filters and its modern derivatives with substantial real world applications. Perhaps of most value to students is the author's use of progressive examples of the internal model principles of the KF applied to common sensor errors.

The appendices include an excellent discussion on the Quaternion parameterization of frame rotations, which is still a rare find in text book form.

There's nothing really wrong with this book. The layout is logical. The chapters are well organised, although there is some to-and-fro between the self-alignment and AHRS chapters. There is example code that seems to work (except, of course, for the really important chapters).

The problem is, Groves (Principles of GNSS, Inertial, and Multi-Sensor Integrated Navigation Systems (GNSS Technology and Applications)) does it better, more logically and, as a practitioner, more useful in implementing a GPS/INS system.

It does do some things better than Groves: it introduces Doppler radar, barometric measurements and other sensors and shows how they can be put into the framework. It also does quaternions, something barely addressed in Groves.

However, from a practitioner's point of view, the "advantage" of leaving the rotation description as neutral makes the presentation more difficult to follow. Groves sticks to DCM for the sake of clarity and it pulls off.

The book isn't as easy to handle as Farrell's "The Global Positioning System & Inertial navigation". A revised edition of this latter book would have been better; there are a lot of mistakes to correct. Still the current book and its precessor are good references for aided inertial navigation.