MEMS-based rotary strapdown inertial navigation system

As the inertial navigation completely depends on the sensed acceleration and rotation rate by IMU, the sensor errors accumulate and eventually lead to diverged inertial solutions. Therefore the compensation of the inertial sensor errors is an effective approach to improve the SINS navigation performance. The rotation error modulation in rotary SINS, which has been extensively used for the filter-optical IMU in the past, is one of the techniques to compensate or mitigate the inertial sensor errors and eventually improve the system navigation performance. The rotary SINS is an inertial navigator in which the IMU is installed on the rotational platform and rotated following the pre-designed rotation configuration, and the rotation error modulation is the technique that compensates the navigation errors caused by inertial sensor bias in a complete rotation cycle by rotating IMU. Given the auto-compensation of inertial sensor bias in rotation error modulation, the objective of this paper to develop a MEMS-based rotary SINS, in which the significant sensor bias is automatically compensated by rotating the IMU, to offer the comparable navigation performance to tactical-grade IMU. Simulation results indicate that, compared with the conventional method, the proposed approach attenuates the navigation errors and improve the calibration accuracy based on the reciprocating rotation scheme can be used to automatically improve the observability. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.