Inertial Navigation Using an Inertial Sensor Array
This work addresses orientation estimation errors in inertial navigation systems, which is a domain-specific problem for applications like robotics or autonomous vehicles, and is incremental as it builds on existing sensor fusion methods with new modeling approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of orientation errors in inertial navigation by fusing measurements from multiple accelerometers and gyroscopes, achieving second-order accuracy in orientation integration compared to traditional first-order methods, which reduces overall navigation error as demonstrated through simulations and real-world experiments.
We present a comprehensive framework for fusing measurements from multiple and generally placed accelerometers and gyroscopes to perform inertial navigation. Using the angular acceleration provided by the accelerometer array, we show that the numerical integration of the orientation can be done with second-order accuracy, which is more accurate compared to the traditional first-order accuracy that can be achieved when only using the gyroscopes. Since orientation errors are the most significant error source in inertial navigation, improving the orientation estimation reduces the overall navigation error. The practical performance benefit depends on prior knowledge of the inertial sensor array, and therefore we present four different state-space models using different underlying assumptions regarding the orientation modeling. The models are evaluated using a Lie Group Extended Kalman filter through simulations and real-world experiments. We also show how individual accelerometer biases are unobservable and can be replaced by a six-dimensional bias term whose dimension is fixed and independent of the number of accelerometers.