Applied singular value decomposition method in transfer alignment and bias calibration

Abstract

The transfer alignment accuracy between the master inertial navigation system (MINS), the slave inertial navigation system (SINS) and the online calibration capability of SINS are the important factors that affect the system performance. The traditional Kalman filtering-based transfer alignment method greatly depends on the prior information. The alignment and calibration based on optimisation-based alignment are preliminarily achieved without the prior information, but many deductions are required to achieve an optimal solution. In this study, a novel method aimed at transfer alignment and bias calibration is proposed, which is based on singular value decomposition by the inertial measurement vector matching equation to construct the least-squares solution. The performance of the system is analysed from the transfer alignment accuracy and the inertial instrument error estimation, respectively. The simulation and flight experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method is concise and effective without complex deduction and calculation. The relative attitude angle between MINS and SINS can be estimated accurately as well as the bias of SINS.