Abstract
This paper presents a multistage in-flight alignment (MIFA) method for a strapdown inertial navigation system (SDINS) suitable for moving vehicles with no initial attitude references. A SDINS mounted on a moving vehicle frequently loses attitude information for many reasons, and it makes solving navigation equations impossible because the true motion is coupled with an undefined vehicle attitude. To determine the attitude in such a situation, MIFA consists of three stages: a coarse horizontal attitude, coarse heading, and fine attitude with adaptive Kalman navigation filter (AKNF) in order. In the coarse horizontal alignment, the pitch and roll are coarsely estimated from the second order damping loop with an input of acceleration differences between the SDINS and GPS. To enhance estimation accuracy, the acceleration is smoothed by a scalar filter to reflect the true dynamics of a vehicle, and the effects of the scalar filter gains are analyzed. Then the coarse heading is determined from the GPS tracking angle and yaw increment of the SDINS. The attitude from these two stages is fed back to the initial values of the AKNF. To reduce the estimated bias errors of inertial sensors, special emphasis is given to the timing synchronization effects for the measurement of AKNF. With various real flight tests using an UH60 helicopter, it is proved that MIFA provides a dramatic position error improvement compared to the conventional gyro compass alignment.