Online evaluation of the inertial sensor qualities for the INS/GPS systems

To deal with the online inertial sensor quality evaluation problem of the inertial navigation system (INS) aided by global positioning system (GPS), an evaluation function is proposed in the framework of optimal fault detection. As inertial sensors are vulnerable to ambient disturbances such as temperature change and vibration during the flight, the system model is reformulated considering the unknown input associated with sensor faults. Then an evaluation function is developed and based on this, an evaluation scheme is proposed for the INS/GPS system. The threshold determination is also discussed through properly selecting the threshold values based on experimental data. Finally, a flight experiment is implemented to validate the proposed method.