A MIMU/GNSS/Magnetometer/Polarized Light Integrated Compass Algorithm

This paper presents an improved algorithm for MIMU/GNSS/Magnetometer/Polarized light integrated north finding for micro-unmanned vehicles. The magnetometer is a cheap and widely used navigation equipment to find north. Sky polarized light from the sun in the daytime has the special characteristic to determinate the relative range vector from the user to the sun. Then the heading angle of the observatory can be calculated if the positioning of the sun is given. The proposed algorithm adopts the polarized light and magnetometer to obtain the heading angle to improve the observability of the classical MIMU/GNSS integrated navigation. Kalman filter is used to integrate the MIMU, GNSS position, velocity and the heading angle. Some land vehicle field experiments were carried out to demonstrate the feasibility of the algorithm in this paper. The accuracy of yaw angle is better than 1°.