The movement of a land vehicle is constrained because the vehicle always remains on the Earth's surface and only experiences small pitch and roll angles. So the GPS/INS integrated system for land vehicle navigation could be reconfigured to be the integration of GPS and reduced INS to cut down the costs. In a reduced INS, the vertical accelerometer and two horizontal gyros could be omitted from the system. But both theoretical analysis and experimental results show that this configuration may result in the divergence of height solution and large velocity errors. To improve the system performances, precise velocity derived from GPS carrier phase measurements, together with the GPS single point positioning solution, is used to aid the reduced INS. Field test results have demonstrated that first, the aiding from GPS precise velocity overcomes the divergence problem of the integrated height solutions and improves the integrated velocity and secondly the proposed novel integration scheme could achieve comparable navigation accuracy with that from the GPS and full INS integrated system.
