Research on the Integrated Navigation Technology of SINS with Couple Odometers for Land Vehicles

Autonomous and accurate acquisition of the position and azimuth of the vehicle is critical to the combat effectiveness of land-fighting vehicles. The integrated navigation system, consisting of a strap-down inertial navigation system (SINS) and odometer (OD), is commonly applied in vehicles. In the SINS/OD integrated system, the odometer is installed around the vehicle’s wheel, while SINS is usually installed on the base of the vehicle. The distance along SINS and OD would cause a velocity difference when the vehicle maneuvers, which may lead to a significant influence on the integration positioning accuracy. Furthermore, SINS navigation errors, especially azimuth error, would diverge over time due to gyro drifts and accelerometer biases. The azimuth error would cause the divergence of dead-reckoning positioning errors with the distance that the vehicle drives. To solve these problems, an integrated positioning and orientation method based on the configuration of SINS and couple odometers was proposed in this paper. The proposed method designed a high precision integrated navigation algorithm, which compensated the lever arm effect to eliminate the velocity difference between SINS and odometers. At the same time, by using the measured information of couple odometers, azimuth reference was calculated and used as an external measurement to suppress SINS azimuth error’s divergence over time, thus could further improve the navigation precision of the integrated system, especially the orientation accuracy. The performance of the proposed method was verified by simulations. The results demonstrated that SINS/2ODs integrated system could achieve a positioning accuracy of 0.01% D (total mileage) and orientation accuracy of ±30″ by using SINS with 0.01°/h Fiber-Optic Gyroscope (FOGs) and 50 µg accelerometers.