Optimization-based INS in-motion alignment approach for underwater vehicles

Abstract Inertial navigation system (INS) in-motion alignment without any geodetic frame observations is still one of the toughest challenges for underwater vehicles. The traditional Kalman-based method which requires a stage of coarse alignment is not suitable for fast in-motion alignment for its slow convergence. In this paper, a novel optimization-based alignment (OBA) scheme is proposed by using the body frame velocity from Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) only when the initial position of the vehicle is available. The INS alignment is transformed into an attitude determination problem which is known as Wahba's problem. A real time implementation using singular value decomposition (SVD) is given. In addition, a backtracking strategy for updating the final position is proposed. Experimental results show that the accuracy of the alignments is within 0.1° in the 600 s alignments.

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