Lever arm compensation of autonomous underwater vehicle for fast transfer alignment

Abstract

Transfer alignment is used to initialize SINS (Strapdown Inertial Navigation System) in motion. Lever-arm effect compensation is studied existing in an AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) before launched from the mother ship. The AUV is equipped with SINS, Doppler Velocity Log, depth sensor and other navigation sensors. The lever arm will cause large error on the transfer alignment between master inertial navigation system and slave inertial navigation system, especially in big ship situations. This paper presents a novel method that can effectively estimate and compensate the flexural lever arm between the main inertial navigation system mounted on the mother ship and the slave inertial navigation system equipped on the AUV. The nonlinear measurement equation of angular rate is derived based on three successive rotations of the body frame of the master inertial navigation system. Nonlinear filter is utilized as the nonlinear estimator for its capability of non-linear approximation. Observability analysis was conducted on the SINS state vector based on singular value decomposition method. State equation of SINS was adopted as the system state equation. Simulation experiments were conducted and results showed that the proposed method can estimate the flexural lever arm more accurately, the precision of transfer alignment was improved and alignment time was shortened accordingly.