Inertial Navigation – Forty Years of Evolution

For over forty years, this Company has been one of the world’s significant players in the field of iner tial navigation. From its inception, as an almost impossible, barelyaffordable technology for guiding strategic missiles, to today’s acceptance of it as an everyday fact of life, the art and craft of iner tial navigation still retains some of its mystique, and continues to provide stretching challenges in engineering. This article doesn’t pretend to be a textbook-there are plenty of excellent and readable texts available (see, for example, refs. (13)). This paper will attempt to explain only what is necessary in order to understand the significance of the current and future trends