Rapid and Accurate INS Transfer Alignment for Air Launched Tactical Missile Using Kalman Filter

Sambhav Kumar Jain; Tapan K. Jain; Saumya Shanker; Srikant Srivastava

doi:10.14429/dsj.73.18435

Sambhav Kumar Jain DRDO-Defence Research and Development Laboratory, Kanchanbagh, Hyderabad - 500 058, India https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9135-2399
Tapan K. Jain Department of Electronics Engineering, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Nagpur - 441 108, India https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0255-0084
Saumya Shanker DRDO-Defence Research and Development Laboratory, Kanchanbagh, Hyderabad - 500 058, India
Srikant Srivastava DRDO-Defence Research and Development Laboratory, Kanchanbagh, Hyderabad - 500 058, India https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9971-2491

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14429/dsj.73.18435

Keywords: Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), Inertial Navigation System (INS), Position Velocity Attitude(PVA), Aircraft navigation system (Master INS), Missile navigation system (Slave INS), Kalman Filter (KF), Transfer Alignment (TA)

Abstract

An Inertial Navigation System (INS) independently measures the Position, Velocity, and Attitude (PVA) of the
vehicle to navigate it towards the target. Since INS is a dead-reckoning system, it requires accurate initialization to
provide the navigation (PVA) solution. In the case of an air-launched tactical missile, the aircraft navigation system
(Master INS) information is used to initialize accurately the missile INS (Slave INS). Rapid transfer alignment is
needed in today’s combat operation to converge slave INS initialization in the shortest possible time using aircraft
navigation information. The transfer alignment consists of first initializing the missile INS and establishing a
navigation solution (PVA) using the missile IMU rates and accelerations, then a Kalman filter is used to, estimate
the errors between the Slave INS and Master INS. The proposed method’s simulation results show that a tactical
missile INS can be aligned to an acceptable accuracy in a very short time based on the aircraft’s attitude information and with natural maneuvers experienced during aircraft take-off.