A dimension reduced INS/VNS integrated navigation method for planetary rovers

Inertial navigation system/visual navigation system (INS/VNS) integrated navigation is a commonly used autonomous navigation method for planetary rovers. Since visual measurements are related to the previous and current state vectors (position and attitude) of planetary rovers, the performance of the Kalman filter (KF) will be challenged by the time-correlation problem. A state augmentation method, which augments the previous state value to the state vector, is commonly used when dealing with this problem. However, the augmenting of state dimensions will result in an increase in computation load. In this paper, a state dimension reduced INS/VNS integrated navigation method based on coordinates of feature points is presented that utilizes the information obtained through INS/VNS integrated navigation at a previous moment to overcome the time relevance problem and reduce the dimensions of the state vector. Equations of extended Kalman filter (EKF) are used to demonstrate the equivalence of calculated results between the proposed method and traditional state augmented methods. Results of simulation and experimentation indicate that this method has less computational load but similar accuracy when compared with traditional methods.