Car Tests for the Estimation of GPS/INS Alignment Error

S. Hon, M.H. Lee, H-H. Chun, S.-H. Kwon

Abstract:	Misalignment can be an important error source in the integration of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and an inertial navigation system (INS). This paper presents car test results to estimate alignment errors in the integration of a low-grade inertial measurement unit (IMU) with accurate GPS measurement systems. Car tests were conducted with a low-cost solid-state IMU and carrier-phase differential GPS measurement systems. Test results confirmed that the angular motion of the test car improves the estimation of the lever arm between the GPS antenna and IMU. They also showed that changes in acceleration improve the estimation of the relative attitude between the reference frames of a GPS antenna array and IMU. The lever arm was estimated with a ten-centimeter error. The relative attitude was estimated with a half-degree error. An iterative scheme was used to estimate the alignment errors during post-processing. The scheme was shown to be useful when the test car could not have sufficient changes in motion due to limitations in its path. With the given set of test data, the estimation error decreased as the number of iterations increased.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 16th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS/GNSS 2003) September 9 - 12, 2003 Oregon Convention Center Portland, OR
Pages:	957 - 967
Cite this article:	Hon, S., Lee, M.H., Chun, H-H., Kwon, S.-H., "Car Tests for the Estimation of GPS/INS Alignment Error," Proceedings of the 16th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS/GNSS 2003), Portland, OR, September 2003, pp. 957-967.
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