A heading sensor suitable for magnetically sensing the heading of a vehicle, such as an automobile, with respect to the earth's magnetic field is disclosed. The heading sensor comprises a square core formed of a magnetically permeable material having wound thereon an exciter winding, two pairs of sense windings and two or more compensation windings. The exciter winding is wound in the same direction (clockwise or counterclockwise) about all of the legs of the core and each sense winding is wound...

A vehicle heading correcting apparatus comprising a gyro, an integrating unit for integrating output data of the gyro, a global positioning system receiver, an acquisition unit for acquiring heading data of a vehicle supplied from the global positioning system receiver, a first computing unit for computing a first turning angle of the vehicle based on two consecutive data of the heading data acquired by the acquisition unit, a second computing unit for computing a second turning angle of the veh...

The invention provides a direction sensor and a method of calibrating a direction sensor having a relative heading sensor and an absolute heading sensor. The method allows calibration of both the relative heading sensor and the absolute heading sensor at the same time, by taking advantage of the known angular relationship between maxima and minima on the measurement curve of the absolute heading sensor. Such maxima and minima are found by rotating the sensors through an angle of at least 360.deg...

A compact lightweight portable heeling/heading rope practicing system with a detachable head portion that provides automated movement simulating the movement of bovine legs using pendular motion driven by a hand cranked spring mechanism and/or electric powered motor, and a method of promoting the sale of such rope practicing systems in conjunction with events in which potential purchasers already participate.

A system for determining the heading and/or attitude of a body receives radio waves from a plurality of position-fixing satellites using at least three antennas fixedly mounted at different positions of the body. To reliably obtain integer ambiguity solutions of carrier phases of the radio waves in a shorter time, the system directly determines integer ambiguities from attitude angle data obtained by an IMU attitude processing section when the integer ambiguities are to be redetermined in the ev...

Two Sagnac interferometers are mounted on board a ship with their axes in a horizontal plane. The axis of one interferometer is aligned in a fore-aft direction whereas the axis of the other interferometer is aligned athwartship. The output signals of the two interferometers are combined mathematically so as to cancel the effects of the ship's latitude and thus provide an output signal independent of this parameter.

A device for measuring the heading error of a missile, comprising two afocal systems for a taking-in-charge field PC and a cruising field CR, in front of a double prism, with a central prism and a peripheral prism of the same angle bonded together with their dihedrals opposed. The double prism is in front of a focusing lens in the focal plane of which are disposed four detectors. When one detector sees the PC field, the other detector sees the CR field. An analog switch permutes in a circular fa...

The invention provides a direction sensor and a method of calibrating a direction sensor having a relative heading sensor and an absolute heading sensor. The method allows calibration of both the relative heading sensor and the absolute heading sensor at the same time, by taking advantage of the known angular relationship between maxima and minima on the measurement curve of the absolute heading sensor. Such maxima and minima are found by rotating the sensors through an angle of at least 360.deg...

A vessel wave heading control apparatus is disclosed for use on a floating vessel. Linear acceleration signals from two accelerometers, which sense the rotational acceleration of the vessel due to waves which impact the vessel from a particular direction, are processed by a computer which subsequently produces vessel heading change signals to the steering and propulsion means of the vessel. These signals indicate the required heading and required rate of change of vessel heading necessary to tur...

An attitude and heading reference detecting apparatus having three gyros and three acceleometers mounted to a navigation vehicle in such a manner that their input axes are made coincident with principal three axial directions of the navigation object, respectively, a magnetic azimuth sensor, a signal transforming section supplied with the outputs from the three gyros, the outputs from the three accelerometers and the output from the magnetic azimuth sensor, a computing section supplied with the ...