A high-precision and high-order error model for airborne distributed POS transfer alignment

Distributed position and orientation systems (DPOSs) can provide abundant time-spatial information for interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) in airborne earth observation systems. However, some key error terms have not been taken into consideration in the traditional low-order error model, which suppresses the performance of the slave POS and further cannot meet the compensation precision of InSAR. To improve the compensation precision, a precise high-order error model with 45 dimensions was derived. Not only does it take into account the influence of scale factor errors and installation errors of the gyro and accelerometer, but it also makes use of random constants and a first-order Markov process model to describe the gyro drift and accelerometer bias. In addition, the flexure angle and its angular rate were added to the state variables of the transfer alignment model. Based on the model, a measurement equation for attitude errors that considers flexure was deduced. Then, a transfer alignment model based on the matching algorithm including position-velocity-attitude was designed. Finally, the proposed model was validated by simulated and real tests, and the experimental results show that its performance is obviously better than that of the traditional model.