Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sytelus 2277 days ago
The fascinating thing is that the Titan was completely inertially guided, i.e., no GPS or ground-based navigation. The high precision IMU + gyro send the computer acceleration and angular velocity and you integrate that over time to figure out where you are now. I'd think this would be very challenging and error-prone for inter-continental travel especially when the thing is planning to detonate nuclear war head. I wonder what algorithms they used. Typical code to do dead reckoning from IMU+gyro is fairly short but drifts usually is huge killer.
1 comments

"Inventing Accuracy" is a fascinating history of ICBM inertial guidance. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/inventing-accuracy