An innovative transfer alignment method based on federated filter for airborne distributed POS

•The real-time and high-precision transfer alignment was studied.•A transfer alignment method based on federated filter was proposed.•This method reduced the system dimension so as to improve the computation speed.•Simulation and static test results indicated the effectiveness of the method.

The real-time and high-precision transfer alignment between the master and slave systems is the key issue for the airborne distributed Position and Orientation System (POS) to realize real-time and high-precision measurement of multipoint motion parameters. To solve the problem, this paper proposes a transfer alignment method based on federated filter, in which the high-dimensional state vector is divided into two parts and as the state vector of two local filters respectively instead of estimating in a centralized filter. This idea reduces the dimension of the system state vector; thus the computation speed is improved. The results of simulation and static ground experiment show that the proposed method runs faster than centralized filter by more than 10% and its alignment precision has the same level as centralized filter’s.