ISL holds unique skills and facilities for the study of the in-flight aerodynamic behaviour of various innovative architectures.

This includes a Soft In-Bore Recovery Facility (SIBREF) to test electronic and mechanical components up to 25 000 g, before submitting them to in-flight tests. There is also an open-air test range where in-flight tests using internal and external instrumentation can be made up to 1000 m distance.

In addition to its capacity to conduct instrumented firings and develop prototypes and sabots, this research domain is working on preserving our knowledge and optimization in the following fields:

• Know-how and direct simulation tools with 6/7 Degrees Of Freedom (DOF) to investigate the flight trajectory and the behaviour of projectiles,
• Know-how and inverse simulation tools (INVERS) with 6/7 DOF. For this, ISL uses the most modern identification techniques to determine the aerodynamic coefficients based on in-flight measurements.

ISL has unique experience in the design, g-hardening and miniaturisation of various sensors, transceivers, antennas and their associated electronics.

The research activities are mainly focused on low-cost navigation units based on magnetometers with or without global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) and on low-cost bidirectional communication and telemetry systems for guided ammunition applications.

These new systems allow a reliable and discrete communication on longer distances, even in jammed or hostile environment.

ISL has aerodynamic testing facilities for the complete range of flow velocities from M 0.1 up to hypervelocities of M 15.

These are small-sized facilities, well-suited for basic scientific studies and functioning at reasonable costs.

Moreover, ISL is able to implement:

• Modern optical measurement techniques PIV, CBOS and Pressure Sensitive Paints (PSP…),
• Specific experimental devices for spinning aerodynamic architectures,
• Semi empirical or numerical simulation tools in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).

ISL develops algorithms for guidance and control (LPV-system, gain scheduling, modern robust control methods H_inf, H₂…), as well as navigation (Kalman filtering and data fusion techniques), and system analysis tools to simulate and evaluate concepts of guided ammunitions.

The research activities mainly focus on algorithms for navigation units based on magnetometers with or without GNSS and on the control of concepts to improve the accuracy and range of guided ammunitions.