Abstract
The navigation subsystem in most platforms is based on an inertial navigation system (INS). Regardless of the INS grade, its navigation solution drifts in time. To avoid such a drift, the INS is fused with external sensor measurements such as a global navigation satellite system (GNSS). Recent publications showed that the lever-arm, defined as the relative position between the INS and aiding sensor, has a strong influence on navigation accuracy. Most research in this field is focused on INS/GNSS fusion with GNSS position or velocity updates while considering various maneuvers types. In this paper, we propose to employ virtual lever-arm (VLA) measurements to improve the accuracy and time to convergence of the observable INS error-states. In particular, we show that VLA measurements improve performance even in stationary conditions. In situations when maneuvering helps to improve state observability, VLA measurements manage to gain additional improvement in accuracy. These results are supported by simulation and field experiments with a vehicle mounted with a GNSS and an INS.
Highlights
Inertial navigation system (INS) and global positioning satellite system (GNSS) fusion aims to utilize the advantages of the two individual systems and overcome their weaknesses
Where Pn and V n are position and velocity vectors expressed in the navigation frame, gn is the b gravitation vector, Tbn is the transformation matrix from body to navigation frame, f ibb and Ωib are the specific force and skew-symmetric matrix of the angular velocity vector expressed in the body frame, and subscripts ‘i’ and ‘e’ were occasionally used to refer to the inertial frame and the Earth-Centered
The standard deviation (STD) of the position and velocity measurements noise was set to 1 m and 0.8 m/s, respectively
Summary
Inertial navigation system (INS) and global positioning satellite system (GNSS) fusion aims to utilize the advantages of the two individual systems and overcome their weaknesses. Sensors 2018, 18, 2228 the modified loosely coupled approach [8] This approach makes use of fictitious satellites based on known satellites trajectories and previous vehicle navigation solutions are constructed to enable a pseudo-GNSS solution to aid the INS. It was suggested [21] to use the lever-arm error as additional error-states in the navigation filter and thereby increasing the state dimension to 18 Using such an error-state model, an observability analysis of LC INS/GNSS approach was made examining the influence of vehicle maneuvers [22,23]. We propose to use a virtual lever-arm (VLA) measurement in addition to a GNSS position or velocity measurements to aid the INS.
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