A Model of Gravity Vector Measurement Noise for Estimating Accelerometer Bias in Gravity Disturbance Compensation

• Main Authors: Junbo Tie, Juliang Cao, Lubing Chang, Shaokun Cai, Meiping Wu, Junxiang Lian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-03-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: inertial navigation; gravity disturbance compensation; estimation; accelerometer bias
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/18/3/883

Compensation of gravity disturbance can improve the precision of inertial navigation, but the effect of compensation will decrease due to the accelerometer bias, and estimation of the accelerometer bias is a crucial issue in gravity disturbance compensation. This paper first investigates the effect of accelerometer bias on gravity disturbance compensation, and the situation in which the accelerometer bias should be estimated is established. The accelerometer bias is estimated from the gravity vector measurement, and a model of measurement noise in gravity vector measurement is built. Based on this model, accelerometer bias is separated from the gravity vector measurement error by the method of least squares. Horizontal gravity disturbances are calculated through EGM2008 spherical harmonic model to build the simulation scene, and the simulation results indicate that precise estimations of the accelerometer bias can be obtained with the proposed method.