The effect of carouseling on MEMS IMU performance for gyrocompassing applications

The concept of carouseling an IMU is simulated in order to improve the accuracy of MEMS IMUs. Carouseling consists of slewing the IMU through a pre-determined trajectory that is selected based on inherent properties that lead to improved performance. MEMS devices typically have far more uncertainty than standard inertial measurement devices, yet are considerably less massive and require less power, so implementing this carouseling scheme could make the use of these lightweight systems possible even in high-accuracy situations, such as gyrocompassing. In gyrocompassing, the most significant benefit provided by the carouseling scheme is the reduction in the error contribution of gyroscope bias, as this error is almost completely eliminated. Additionally, it was found that although implementing the carouseling scheme required the addition of error states to account for the size effect, in many cases these error states may not be necessary. Overall, the carouseling of the MEMS IMUs was shown to be effective in reducing azimuth error covariance significantly.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Renkoski, Benjamin Matthew

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Matthew Bottkol and Emilio Frazzoli.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/51645

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/51645