Advances in Attitude Determination With Redundant Inertial Measurement Units

摘要

Key results of several recent papers on attitude determination and calibration with Redundant Inertial Measurement Units (RIMU) are summarized, and some subtleties are illuminated. The RIMU Attitude Determination/Calibration (RADICAL) filter has been implemented in commercial off-the-shelf software. A RIMU, which has more than three angular rate sense axes, offers enhanced system performance in terms of availability, reliability, redundancy, and accuracy. We discuss how to exploit the analytical redundancy of the RIMU to maximize the potential performance of a spacecraft system. Some of the observability properties that result from analytical redundancy are demonstrated via simulation. It is shown that calibration accuracy can be partially maintained even in the absence of attitude measurements.