Ground Testing of Inertial Navigators to Improve Dynamic Performance

A ground testing method has been devised to evaluate the dynamic errors of an inertial navigation system. A trimmed stationary inertial system in the navigation mode can be subjected to programmed platform orm drift rates, and generate position outputs which are compared with those of a perfect navigator. The linearized error equations for this testing mode are derived and the resulting position error propagation is analyzed using Kalman filtering in order to identify the error sources. A simulated platform with a fixed set of error sources is analyzed to evaluate this testing concept. An example is presented to show that the gyro and accelerometer scale factor and misalignment error coefficients can be estimated.