Integration of angular rate sensors for line of sight stabilization systems

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to digital@library.tamu.edu, referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references.Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.Line of sight stabilization systems are common in tracking systems that are carried aboard host vehicles. For these systems, accurate knowledge of angular rates in the tracking system is needed for good performance. Angular rates are typically measured using gyroscopic sensors. In this thesis, integration of angular rate sensors based on the magnetohydrodynamic principle and gyroscopic sensors is shown to improve the accuracy of angular rate measurements. A survey of different methods of integrating signals is provided. A comparison of the different methods applied to a particular system is also provided. It is shown that, in some cases, a simple parameter optimized filter can provide results almost as good as that of a filter. It is also shown that the parameter optimized filter is less sensitive to modeling errors than the Kalman filter for integrating gyroscopic and magnetohydrodynamic angular rate sensors