Analytic Coarse Transfer Alignment Based on Inertial Measurement Vector Matching and Real-Time Precision Evaluation

Abstract

This paper presents an analytic coarse transfer alignment method based on inertial measurement vector matching for the inertial navigation system (INS) on vertically launched missiles from the ground. The alignment problem is transformed into the estimation of the relative attitude between the master INS (MINS) and slave INS (SINS) by decomposing the attitude matrix of SINS. As inspired by the ideology of the traditional analytic alignment method, the measurements from the accelerometers and gyroscopes of MINS and SINS are utilized to construct matching vectors to estimate the relative attitude between them without any initial information. Furthermore, the sensitivity of Euler angles with respect to the inertial sensor errors is analyzed according to the presented coarse transfer alignment principle. An algebraic expression for alignment error estimation is given, and thus the real-time precision evaluation for the presented coarse alignment method is achieved. It allows the system to switch to fine alignment in a timely and accurate manner. The simulation and flight test demonstrate that, compared with the quaternion-optimization-based alignment method proposed by Kang et al. , the presented method has a smaller calculation cost and satisfactory convergence. The corresponding precision evaluation algorithm can describe the trend of true alignment error accurately, and is good enough to judge the moment for switching to the fine alignment.