Transfer Alignment for Inertial Navigation Systems

Transfer alignment is the process of initialization of a guided munition’s inertial navigation system with the aid of the carrier platform’s navigation system. One important problem in transfer alignment is the attitude uncertainty of lever arm between munition’s and carrier’s navigation systems. In order to have a rapid transfer alignment, attitude data should be included in transfer alignment with proper handling of lever arm uncertainty. Modeling and compensation of vibration induced inertial sensor errors should also be done in rapid transfer alignment The purpose of this book is to compensate the errors arising from the dynamics of the platform, lever arm, mechanical vibration effects and inertial sensor error amplification, thus designing a transfer alignment algorithm under real environment conditions. The algorithm design begins with observability analysis, which is not done in detail for transfer alignment in literature. In order to make proper compensations, characterization and modeling of vibration and lever arm environment is done for the helicopter. Also, vibration based errors of MEMS based inertial sensors are experimentally shown.