Design of Transfer Alignment Algorithm with Velocity and Azimuth Matching for the Aircraft Having Wing Flexibility

A transfer alignment is used to initialize, align, and calibrate a SINS(Slave INS) using a MINS(Master INS) in motion. This paper presents an airborne transfer alignment with velocity and azimuth matching to estimate inertial sensor biases under the wing flexure influence. This study also considers the lever arm, time delay and relative orientation between MINS and SINS. The traditional transfer alignment only uses velocity matching. In contrast, this paper utilizes the azimuth matching to prevent divergence of the azimuth when the aircraft is stationary or quasi-stationary since the azimuth is less affected by the wing flexibility. The performance of the proposed Kalman filter is analyzed using two factors; one is the estimation performance of gyroscope and accelerometer bias and the other is comparing aircraft dynamics and attitude covariance. The performance of the proposed filter is verified using a long term flight test. The test results show that the proposed scheme can be effectively applied to various platforms that require airborne transfer alignment.