Message posted by gary on February 09, 2002 at 9:11:12 PST:

If the guidance is GPS based, I think cost is not an issue. It is the inertial navigation that costs money, and that may not be the case any more. The expensive item in inertial navigation is the accelerometer, and there are less accurate but cheaper silicon based solutions. I did a bid for a custom chip many years ago that interfaced to such an accelerometer. The company was Systron-Donner. Somebody else got the contract, so I don't have any follow up, but the point is there are cheap solutions out there.

If the notion of inertial guidance based on accelerometers is a bit foreign, the idea is pretty simple. You know your initial starting point. If you can sense your acceleration in the x and y axis, using integration you can figure out your velocity and with another integration your position. So you know where you started and how you moved, so in theory you know where you are.

In Reply to: The Bomb Train posted by Rocketfox on February 09, 2002 at 8:38:35 PST:

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