High-degree Cubature Kalman Filtering Approach for GPS Aided In-Flight Alignment of SDINS

A High-degree Cubature Kalman Filter (CKF) is proposed to deal with the Strapdown Inertial Navigation System (SDINS) alignment problem. In-flight Alignment (IFA) is an effective method to compensate for attitude errors of the navigation system. While providing precise attitude error compensation, however, the external source aided alignment often creates a nonlinear filtering problem caused by a large misalignment angle. Introduced recently, Cubature Kalman Filter is a suitable technique for various nonlinear problems. In this paper, a higher degree CKF is applied to this accuracy-is-everything SDINS IFA problem. The simulation results show that the proposed technique outperformed a traditional nonlinear filter in terms of precision and alignment time.