Transfer Alignment Design and Evaluation Environment

Abstract

The first phase of flight of the advanced kinetic energy missile (ADKEM) is inertial guidance whose performance is affected particularly by the navigation accuracy. Owing to the rapid acceleration during the missile launch phase, the effect of misalignment is magnified, significantly contributing to the miss distance. A high precision transfer alignment is thus required to reduce the initial navigation error. The estimation of the initial misalignment with transfer alignment technique has to act against various error sources involved in the velocity and/or attitude differences. On the other hand, due to limitations in complexity and computation, only linear models of first order approximation are used in transfer alignment filter design. Therefore, it is indispensable to evaluate a transfer alignment filter design not only with a linear model-based covariance analysis but also with a nonlinear Monte Carlo simulation. This paper presents in detail such a transfer alignment design and evaluation environment.