Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2016
The traditional Kalman filtering-based transfer alignment methods largely depend on prior information for initialisation. However, the initialisation process is hard to fulfil on a moving base. In this paper, a type of inertial measurement vector integration matching for optimisation-based transfer alignment and calibration is proposed to estimate the misalignment between the Master Inertial Navigation System (MINS) and Slave Inertial Navigation System (SINS), and main inertial sensor error parameters of SINS, including bias and scale factor error. In contrast to filter techniques, the proposed method has the capability of self-initialisation and provides a new idea to solve the alignment and calibration problem. No prior information is needed. Moreover, the integration time interval for the matching inertial measurement vector is selected by considering both the observation degree of inertial sensor error parameters and the noise effect. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method has faster convergence and is more accurate than Kalman filter techniques.