Flight Demonstration of High Altitude Aircraft Navigation With Cellular Signals

This article presents the first demonstration of navigation with cellular signals of opportunity (SOPs) on a high-altitude aircraft. An extensive flight campaign was conducted by the Autonomous Systems Perception, Intelligence, and Navigation Laboratory in collaboration with the U.S. Air Force to sample ambient downlink cellular SOPs in different regions in Southern California, USA. Carrier phase measurements were produced from these signals, which were subsequently fused in an extended Kalman filter along with altimeter measurements to estimate the aircraft’s state (position, velocity, and time). Three flights are performed in three different regions: 1) rural, 2) semiurban, and 3) urban. A multitude of flight trajectories and altitudes above ground level (AGL) was exercised in the three flights: 1) a 51-km trajectory of grid maneuvers with banking and straight segments at about 5,000 ft AGL, 2) a 57-km trajectory of a teardrop descent from 7,000 ft AGL down to touchdown at the runway, and 3) a 55-km trajectory of a holding pattern at about 15,000 ft AGL. The estimated aircraft trajectory is computed for each flight and compared with the trajectory from the aircraft’s onboard navigation system, which utilized a GPS receiver coupled with an inertial navigation system and an altimeter. The cellular SOPs produced remarkable sustained navigation accuracy over the entire flight trajectories in all three flights, achieving a 3D position root mean-squared error of 10.53 m, 4.96 m, and 15.44 m, respectively.