Semi-physical research for INS/GPS integrated navigation

Inertial navigation system (INS) has a fatal flaw that positioning accuracy deteriorates with time due to possible inherent sensor errors. In order to improve the accuracy and reliability of navigation, INS/GPS system integrated with position and velocity is proposed. Core to integrated navigation systems is the concept of fusing noisy observations from GPS, Inertial Measurement Units (IMU), and other available sensors. Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) is a filtering algorithm suitable for combining the sensor measurements with predictions coming from nonlinear models of vehicle motion. The filter has the advantages of high accuracy and reliability, and it doesn't need to linearize the nonlinear model. A semi-physical experiment research platform is used to demonstrate the results. The results significantly demonstrate the superiority of the integrated navigation and the performance of UKF-based navigation system is superior to that of the system based traditional Kalman filter on accuracy and reliability.