Strapdown Guidance Error Analysis

A crucial part of so-called "strapdown" techniques for inertial guidance systems is the generation of the matrix of direction cosines relating the body axes to the reference axes. This is generally done by direct integration of a set of differential equations having the body angular velocities as inputs. This paper is devoted to an error analysis of two commonly used integration schemes, namely, direction cosines and quaternions. Scale, skew, and drift errors are defined, and the susceptibility of the integration schemes to these types of error is examined. It is concluded that the quaternion scheme offers an advantage because it intrinsically yields zero skew error. The paper is presented in two parts, for convenience.