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The paper intends to present goals and experimental results of the ERSEC Project (Enhanced Road Safety by integrating Egnos-Galileo data with on-board Control System), a two-year project funded by the European Commission aiming at broadening the scope of application of the EGNOS/GNSS (and later Galileo) and EDAS systems to road transport, through an appropriate integration and data fusion with measurement data coming from other measuring instruments. More specifically, the S&T objective of the project is to develop a measuring system - to be used on board of vehicles - able to output the position on the road map of the equipped vehicle and of all the obstacles (such as other vehicles, peoples and any kind of fixed or mobile objects) around it with a measurement accuracy of the order of fraction of metres at a sampling rate of 100 Hz.

The paper presents feasibility and effectiveness of an innovative algorithm for spacecraft attitude determination, based on the real time fusion of raw data measurements provided by APS cameras, less limited by metrological constraints than traditional cameras used for star detection, and MEMS gyros, characterized by low-mass, low-power and low recurrent costs. The basic concept and the followed S&T methodological approach is described, which includes the use of cameras and gyros, even if the above basic concept states that gyros measurement data are neither strictly necessary, nor are increasing the attitude measurement accuracy in steady state conditions. Indeed, the availability of the gyro measurement data significantly contributes to the robustness of the spacecraft attitude measurement system particularly in “lost in space” and in “occulted camera” conditions. High quality gyros are not required.