Engineering Commons^™

A Low-Cost Gps/Inertial Position Determination System For High Altitude Balloons, Spacecraft And Unmanned Aerial Systems, Tyler Leben, Jeremy Straub, Ronald Marsh

Jeremy Straub

A low-cost system is needed to determine precise position and predict future location in flight and low-Earth orbit. One method to accomplish this task is to utilize an onboard GPS receiver. GPS units receive data from the GPS NAVSTAR constellation of 24 satellites in the form of a 37 byte ASCII text sent at 4800 baud called NMEA sentences. The standard is 1 HZ, which is one sentence per second, but can be more. Ideally, from this data a PVT (position, velocity, time) and altitude can be determined. This data is then transferred from the GPS module to a separate …