Alignment of MEMS in Civilian Vehicle Navigation

The integration of low-cost MEMS with GPS provides a more reliable velocity and position solution as the MEMS are able to propagate navigation state information during GPS outages in the urban environment. A convenient, practical method is proposed in this paper to implement the alignment of MEMS with the vehicle body frame. Special maneuvers of vehicle are restricted to estimate the mounting angles of roll, pitch, and yaw and the error analysis is implemented. Two classes of inertial sensors (SPAN-CPT and MTw) were tested in the repeated experiments to evaluate the property of aligning method. The testing experiments provide the alignment of roll and pitch within 1 degrees and yaw within 2 degrees, which is able to propagate navigation state information during the outages of GPS in civilian vehicle and improve the effectiveness of the integrated navigation system.