Estimate the Pitch and Heading Mounting Angles of the IMU for Land Vehicular GNSS/INS Integrated System

Abstract

Nonholonomic constraint (NHC) and odometer speed have been proven to significantly improve the navigation accuracy of a global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-aided inertial navigation system (INS) for land vehicular applications. Exploiting the full potential of the NHC and odometer aids requires the inertial measurement unit (IMU) mounting angles, i.e., angular misalignment with respect to the host vehicle, to be precisely known. We address the accurate estimation of the IMU mounting angles through an aided dead reckoning (DR) approach. In this method, DR using the GNSS/INS integrated attitude and distance traveled is fused with the GNSS/INS integrated position through a straightforward Kalman filter. Simulation and field tests are carried out to validate the proposed algorithm for different grade IMUs, including typical navigation-grade, tactical-grade and low-cost IMUs. The results demonstrate that the pitch and heading mounting angles can be estimated with a comparable accuracy with the GNSS/INS attitude solution, for example, 0.001° accuracy can be achieved for a navigation-grade GNSS/INS integrated system. The roll mounting angle can not be estimated due to lack of observability in this approach, and the heading mounting angle estimation may be influenced by the GNSS/INS heading accuracy drift to some extent for the low-cost IMUs.