In-flight inertial navigation system alignment under non-controlled delays in aiding data

Abstract

In the presented paper we consider a well-known in-flight alignment problem for strapdown inertial navigation system (INS) via position and velocity data provided by the reference inertial navigation system. Main challenges of the mentioned problem are displacement of the reference navigation system relative to the navigation system being aligned, mutual misalignment of the relevant body frames, the presence of uncontrolled time delays in the positional and velocity aiding data. We propose in-flight alignment algorithm that was tested based on simulation. Typical vehicle’s trajectories were derived from relevant telemetry data. The results of numerical experiments are also presented.