Numerical Aspects of Inertial Navigation

This paper presents an investigation of the possibility of using the fixed-point arithmetic in the inertial navigation systems which use the local level navigation frame mechanization equations. Two square root filtering methods, the Potter's square root Kalman filter and UD factorized Kalman filter, are compared with respect to the conventional Kalman filter and its Joseph's stabilized form. The effect of rounding errors to the Kalman filter optimality is evaluated for various lengths of the fractional part of the fixed-point computational word. Main contribution of this research lies in an evaluation of the minimal fixed-point arithmetic word length for the Phi-angle error model with noise statistics which correspond to the tactical grade inertial measurements units.