An Improved and Efficient Algorithm for SINS/GPS/Doppler Integrated Navigation Systems

Abstract

Inertial navigation systems exhibit position errors that tend to grow with time in an unbounded mode. This degradation is due, in part, to errors in the initialization of the inertial measurement unit and inertial sensor imperfections such as accelerometer biases and gyroscope drifts. Mitigation to this growth and bounding the errors is to update the inertial navigation system periodically with external position (and/or velocity, attitude) fixes. The synergistic effect is obtained through external measurements updating the inertial navigation system using Kalman filter algorithm. It is a natural requirement that the inertial data and data from the external aids be combined in an optimal and efficient manner. In this paper an efficient method for integration of Strapdown Inertia Navigation System (SINS), Global Positioning System (GPS) and Doppler radar is presented using a centralized linear Kalman filter by treating vector measurements with uncorrelated errors as scalars. Two main advantages have been obtained with this improved scheme. First is the reduced computation time as the number of arithmetic computation required for processing a vector as successive scalar measurements is significantly less than the corresponding number of operations for vector measurement processing. Second advantage is the improved numerical accuracy as avoiding matrix inversion in the implementation of covariance equations improves the robustness of the covariance computations against round off errors.