A multi-axis alternating continuous rotation scheme for tri-axis rotational inertial navigation system (RINS) with fiber optic gyro

Abstract Benefiting from the rotational modulation technique and the gimbal structure, rotational inertial navigation system (RINS) can improve navigation accuracy by about one order of magnitude compared with the strap-down inertial navigation system (SINS). By continuously rotating around a fixed axis, the constant and slow variability errors perpendicular to the direction of the rotation axis can be effectively restrained while the errors in the direction of the rotation axis cannot be suppressed. Therefore, a multi-axis rotation scheme needs to be designed. Meantime, the fiber optic gyro (FOG), as a very popular inertial device, is well suited for RINS but has a larger scale factor error and poorer stability than the laser gyro; thus, it is not suitable to flip the inertial measurement unit (IMU) around the horizontal axis too much in the rotation scheme to avoid the rapid accumulation of horizontal misalignment angle. Accordingly, we propose a multi-axis alternating continuous rotation scheme for tri-axis RINS with FOG. During the navigation process, the inner, middle and outer gimbals rotate forward and reverse in sequence. The IMU rotates continuously in the three-axis direction can effectively suppress the effects of constant and slow-varying errors and also avoid the large velocity errors oscillation caused by flipping the IMU. The simulations and navigation tests show that the multi-axis alternating continuous rotation scheme can achieve navigation accuracy comparable to the multi-position rotation scheme and reduce the oscillation of velocity errors, which has important research significance and engineering value for the research of RINS with FOG.