A New Breakthrough in Inertial Navigation
It is essential for a boat and especially for warship to know its position at all time. This remained a problem during centuries and celestial navigation has often been used to deal with it until GPS has changed this paradigm. But, in a war environment, GPS can easily be jammed and celestial navigation isn’t really an option anymore. The best alternative is to use a high grade INS (Inertial Navigation System) which, once initialized with an absolute position, can calculate the current position without any GPS aiding and in a perfectly stealthy manner, relying on measurement from accelerometers (which measures longitudinal accelerations) and gyroscopes (which measures rate of turn).
IXBlue is a fairly young company in this area although it has been a main actor of FOG development for more than 20 years. Despite this, iXBlue has regularly shown a great capability for innovation. In addition to a high reliability, linked to a perfectly solid-state design, that have made its success for space applications, FOG technology has now exceeded RLG (ring laser gyroscopes) performances and has not yet reached a limit. As proof, iXBlue has recently unveiled, on the occasion of the French Naval Defence Show Euronaval, a new high grade product named Marins M7. This product guarantees a position of 1Nautic Mile after 72 hours without GPS. Euronaval Innovation trophy came to celebrate this huge progress in navigation technology.
Marins M7 comes as a new product of an already large offer that covers all navies requirements from simple navigation AHRS (Attitude and Heading Reference System) with Quadrans to stabilization with Octans and any level of INS with Phins and now three different Marins.
Initially centered on civil offshore and science markets, iXBlue has soon been contacted by navies to supply them with AHRS and INS. French navy, Dutch navy and the US Coast Guard were among the first to select iXBlue products and still do. That interest lead iXBlue to develop Marins, its first INS dedicated to military operation. Since that, Marins has been chosen by UK Navy for Astute class SSN and Queen Elizabeth aircraft carriers and more recently by Swedish submarine manufacturer Kockums.
Marins M7 will, no doubt, allow iXBlue to continue this success story and most of the navies should find this has an opportunity to increase their submarines operational capability.
