An Integrated Synthetic Aperture Radar/Global Positioning System/Inertial Navigation System for Target Geolocation Improvement

This thesis explores a potential integration technique to fuse information from an inertial navigation system (INS) and global positioning system (GPS) with synthetic aperture radar target measurements. Using Kalman filtering techniques, an INSIGPS/SAR integrated system was simulated in a single Kalman filter to analyze the SAR target geolocation accuracy benefits. Three different GPS receiver models were used in the integrated system: stand-alone (SGPS), differential (DGPS), and carrier-phase differential GPS (CPGPS). Each of these GPS models were integrated with a common INSISAR combination to determine the target geolocation accuarcy improvements due only to GPS receiver type. Thesis results show that SAR targeting can be enhanced, through tight integration of an INS/GPS navigation system, without increasing the SAR resolution. This work represents some of the first integrations work of only SAR range and range rate measurements into an INS/GPS integrated system to provide better accuracy in estimating ground target geolocation errors