An INS/Geomagnetic Integrated Navigation Method for Coarse Estimation of Positioning Error and Search Area Adaption Applied to High-Speed Aircraft

Abstract

The geomagnet aided inertial navigation algorithm has become one of the current research hotspots in the field of aircraft navigation. It can overcome the shortcomings of pure inertial navigation error accumulation over time and achieve long-term, autonomous, and all-weather navigation. The traditional iterative closest contour point (ICCP) algorithm, however, requires high sensor performance, has poor tolerance to noise, and has a complex algorithm with poor real-time performance. The timeliness of the traditional magnetic contour matching (MAGCOM) algorithm is related to the search area, the matching search area is fixed, and the algorithm is inflexible. To address the above problems, this article proposes a geomagnetic navigation method based on coarse estimation of navigation error and search area adaption. When the aircraft flies into the geomagnetic database region, the navigation error is roughly estimated based on the error characteristics of the inertial navigation system. Considering the influence of noise and uncertainty, three times the value of the estimated error is used as the edge length of the geomagnetic matching search area, and geomagnetic matching is performed for positioning. The product of velocity and time provided by the inertial navigation system is used as a constraint to determine whether the geomagnetic matching results are abnormal. If multiple consecutive geomagnetic matching results are normal, the navigation system automatically reduces the matching search area and search step to improve the matching accuracy and timeliness. Simulation experiments show that the accuracy of the adaptive search area geomagnetic matching method proposed in this article can reach within 200 m.