Rapid and Accurate INS Transfer Alignment for Air Launched Tactical Missile Using Kalman Filter.

Abstract

An Inertial Navigation System (INS) independently measures the Position, Velocity, and Attitude (PVA) of the vehicle to navigate it towards the target. Since INS is a dead-reckoning system, it requires accurate initialization to provide the navigation (PVA) solution. In the case of an air-launched tactical missile, the aircraft navigation system (Master INS) information is used to initialize accurately the missile INS (Slave INS). Rapid transfer alignment is needed in today's combat operation to converge slave INS initialization in the shortest possible time using aircraft navigation information. The transfer alignment consists of first initializing the missile INS and establishing a navigation solution (PVA) using the missile IMU rates and accelerations, then a Kalman filter is used to, estimate the errors between the Slave INS and Master INS. The proposed method's simulation results show that a tactical missile INS can be aligned to an acceptable accuracy in a very short time based on the aircraft's attitude information and with natural maneuvers experienced during aircraft take-off.
Subjects
KALMAN filtering; INERTIAL navigation systems

Description