Attitude Determination

Attitude is determined from multiple GPS antennas installed on a rigid platform, and is expressed as the orientation of this platform relative to the local geographical axes (East, North, Up). Attitude determination with GPS is based on the use of highly precise carrier phase measurements in a way very similar to RTK: the orientation of antenna baseline vectors defines the platform attitude. Because GPS measurements of multiple antennas are involved, typical GPS-based attitude systems include multiple GPS receivers.

Septentrio offers a first-of-a-kind single-board attitude determination system based on its unique multi-antenna GPS receiver PolaRx2@, which can simultaneously receive and process GPS measurements from 3 antennas. In a sense of size, weight, and power consumption the attitude receiver is not different from a regular PolaRx2. The achievable accuracy depends mainly upon the baseline between the antennas (the longer the baseline, the higher is the accuracy). RMS error of attitude for a baseline of 1m is 0.5 degrees for pitch/roll and 0.3 degrees for heading.