Random misalignment and lever arm vector online estimation in shipborne aircraft transfer alignment

Abstract Shipborne aircrafts normally do not have regular position on the carrier. This would lead to large misalignment between the master strapdown inertial navigation system (M-SINS) and slave strapdown inertial navigation system (S-SINS) as well as random lever arm vector. It is critical for the accuracy of the transfer alignment. The large attitude error will make the linear alignment algorithm invalid. And the lever arm vector caused by the location difference will lead to the lever arm effect which is sensed by the accelerometers in the S-SINS. Therefore it is necessary for the shipborne aircraft to estimate the lever arm vector and misalignment before the transfer alignment takes place. In this paper, a new misalignment and lever arm vector online estimation method based on gyroscope, accelerometer measurement and filtering is presented. Sensor measurements of M-SINS and S-SINS will be recorded for a few seconds. Misalignment and the lever arm vector will be calculated from these measurements directly. The values will be filtered according to the chosen threshold of the error gain. Then a second stage estimation based on least square estimation will be applied to acquire a better result. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the estimation algorithm in the situation when both large misalignment and random lever arm vector exist.