The book establishes the core principles fundamental to the analysis and design of autonomous and aided strapdown inertial navigation systems. It provides a detailed account of contemporary strapdown systems from both an analytical and a computational perspective.

The book is divided into thirteen chapters and four appendices. Chapter 1 provides an overview of inertial navigation and its various forms of implementation. Chapter 2 provides a review of some key concepts in mathematics and random processes that are of importance in the subsequent chapters. Chapter 3 deals with a number of principal attitude-parameterization concepts commonly employed in strapdown system implementation and analysis. Chapter 4 establishes the basic computational equations of strapdown inertial navigation systems. Chapter 5 is devoted to the optimization of the attitude-computation function. Chapter 6 is devoted to the optimization of the velocity-computation function. Chapter 7 deals with the optimizations of the position-computation function and the computation of the integral of the product of two oscillatory signals. Chapter 8 develops a linear error model for strapdown navigation systems, suitable for detailed system performance analysis of both autonomous and aided navigation systems and for use in real-time aided-navigation applications. Chapter 9 explores the subject of Kalman Filtering and its various forms of implementation. Chapter 10 deals with the performance analysis of autonomous and aided strapdown navigation systems. Chapter 11 deals with the Global Positioning System as an aiding device to be optimally integrated with a strapdown navigation system by means of a Kalman Filter. Chapter 12 presents five detailed case studies involving aerospace strapdown applications, and Chapter 13 presents three detailed case studies involving industrial and scientific strapdown applications. The four appendices provide additional material relevant to Chapters 4, 5, 6, 9, 10 and 11.

The book is intended as a reference work for practitioners, as a tutorial work for those entering the field of strapdown navigation systems and as a resource for students in aerospace engineering and related academic pursuits.

The author, Mario Ignagni, has enjoyed a long career in the aerospace industry. He served as an analyst and design engineer for the Apollo Command/Service Module thrust-vector control system, and also in this same capacity for the Space Shuttle fuel-mixture control system. He was a member of the team that developed the first strapdown navigation system for commercial and military aviation applications, incorporating newly developed laser-gyro technology. The author has published extensively in the areas of strapdown navigation system algorithms and Kalman filter theory. He has been granted numerous patents in aided and unaided navigation system concepts, laser gyro output processing, pipeline inspection systems, paper manufacturing, metrology and medical devices. The author received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Detroit, and an M.S. degree in Control Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is presently a staff member at ASTER Labs, Inc., a Minnesota-based engineering research company.