In-Flight Alignment of Inertial Navigation System Using Line-Of-Sight Information

This paper presents an in-flight alignment method for strapdown inertial navigation systems based on the line-of-sight information. Unlike the existing methods, the proposed method utilizes only the 2-axis angle measurements of the onboard image sensor and does not require any explicit range measurements between the vehicle and landmarks. To improve the accuracy of all the position, velocity, and attitude estimates through the in-flight alignment, an error model of the image-sensor-aided SDINS is derived. A simulation study demonstrates that the accuracy of SDINS can be improved by the line-of-sight information only.