Rapid Initial Alignment of Dual-Axis Rotational Inertial Navigation Using Phase-Preserving Angular-Rate Reconstruction and Dynamic Lever-Arm Compensation
Dual-axis rotation can modulate constant and low-frequency errors of inertial sensors; however, low-frequency platform motion introduces dynamic lever-arm velocity into GNSS-aided alignment measurements. We propose a rapid initial alignment framework that integrates encoder-aided compensation for mechanism-induced angular velocity, multi-axis dominant frequency estimation, phase-preserving robust harmonic regression, dynamic lever-arm velocity transfer, period-matched velocity/position integral measurements, and component-wise robust filtering. The frequency estimator employs reliability gating to handle competing non-harmonic spectral peaks and propagates reconstruction quality into the measurement covariance. In static eight-position experiments, the peak-to-peak variation in heading repeatability ranged from 15.12 arcseconds to 52.20 arcseconds. In vehicle-mounted experiments against a known 50 mil heading reference, compared with a conventional error-state Kalman filter using velocity/position matching, the proposed method reduced the heading RMSE from 62.3 arcseconds to 27.3 arcseconds and the within-series peak-to-peak spread from 149.9 arcseconds to 65.1 arcseconds, both by about 56%. In the shipborne experiment, the dominant component of the joint attitude spectrum of the moored vessel was identified at 0.0430 Hz; with identical hardware, identical data, and an identical navigation solver, the proposed alignment method reduced the horizontal position RMSE of 15-day pure inertial navigation from 1033.02 m to 437.23 m (a 57.7% reduction) and the maximum horizontal error from 3438.69 m to 1011.30 m compared with the conventional alignment algorithm.
Authors
- Jiangyuan Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-7270-3577)
- Tao Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9955-3905)
- Jincheng Peng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4784-6946)
- Gongliu Yang
Institutions
- Jimei University (CN)
- Zhejiang University (CN)
- Southeast University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Applied Sciences
- Published
- 2026-10-28
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/app162110674
- Primary Topic
- Inertial Sensor and Navigation
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- Southeast University
- Science, Technology and Innovation Commission of Shenzhen Municipality
- Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities