Improved calibration method for SDINS considering body-frame drift

A calibration method for a strap-down inertial navigation system (SDINS) is presented here. The body-frame drift induced by the variation of the accelerometer sensing axe due to temperature changes is an important source of navigation error not considered in conventional calibration methods. In this paper, we propose an advanced calibration method that can compensate for SDINS error sources including not only bias, scale factor, and misalignment but also the body-frame drift by utilizing a 2-axis turntable. The body-frame drift is estimated using horizontal accelerometer measurements during a calibration procedure. Simulation results show that the body-frame drift behaves like an additional gyro bias error and that the proposed calibration technique can significantly improve pure navigation performance by removing the effect of body-frame drift.