The paper presents a method of developing a variable structure measurement system with intelligent components for flight vehicles. In order to find a distinguishing feature of a variable structure, a numerical criterion for selecting measuring sensors is proposed by quantifying the observability of different states of the system. Based on the Peter K. Anokhin’s theory of functional systems, a mechanism of “action acceptor” is built with intelligent components, e.g. self-organization algorithms. In this mechanism, firstly, prediction models of system states are constructed using self-organization algorithms; secondly, the predicted and measured values are compared; thirdly, an optimal structure of the measurement system is finally determined based on the results of comparison. According to the results of simulation with practical data and experiments obtained during field tests, the novel developed measurement system has the properties of high-accuracy, reliable operation and fault tolerance.

More accurate navigation systems are always required for autonomous unmanned underwater vehicles (AUUV)s under various circumstances. In this paper, a measuring complex of a heavy unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) was investigated. The measuring complex consists of an inertial navigation platform system, a Doppler lag (DL) and an estimation algorithm. During a relatively long-term voyage of an UUV without surfacing and correction from buoys and stationary stations, errors of the measuring complex will increase over time. The increase in errors is caused by an increase in the deviation angles of the gyro platform relative to the accompanying trihedron of the selected coordinate system. To reduce these angles, correction is used in the structure of the inertial navigation system (INS) using a linear regulator. To increase accuracy, it is proposed to take into account the nonlinear features of INS errors; an adaptive nonlinear Kalman filter and a nonlinear controller were used in the correction scheme. Considering that, a modified nonlinear Kalman filter and a regulator in the measuring complex are proposed to improve the accuracy of the measurement information, and modification of the nonlinear Kalman filter was performed through a genetic algorithm, in which the regulator was developed by the State Dependent Coefficient (SDC) method of the formulated model. Modeling combined with a semi-natural experiment with a real inertial navigation system for the UUV demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.