Nonlinear Filtering Approaches to In-flight Alignment of SDINS with Large Initial Attitude Error

This paper describes the in-flight alignment of SDINS (Strapdown Inertial Navigation Systems) using an EKF (Extended Kalman Filter) and a UKF (Unscented Kalam Filter), which allow large initial attitude error uncertainty. Regardless of the inertial sensors, there are nonlinear error dynamics of SDINS in cases of large initial attitude errors. A UKF that is one of the nonlinear filtering approaches for IFA (In-Flight Alignment) are used to estimate the attitude errors. Even though the EKF linearized model makes velocity errors when predicting incorrectly in case of large attitude errors, a UKF can represent correctly the velocity errors variations of attitude errors with nonlinear attitude error components. Simulation results and analyses show that a UKF works well to handle large initial attitude errors of SDINS and the alignment error attitude estimation performance are quite improved.