Alignment calibration of IMU and Doppler sensors for precision INS/DVL integrated navigation

Alignment calibration of Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and Doppler sensors is an essential task for precision Inertial Navigation System/Doppler Velocity Log (INS/DVL) integrated navigation. In this paper, the so called alignment calibration problem is transformed into the problem of estimation of the alignment parameters between two point series. The two continuous and synchronized series are designed by the integrated navigation results of INS/GPS and DVL measurements. The Single Value Decomposition (SVD) based least squares estimation method is employed for the calibration. The performance of these estimates is evaluated with experimental data on several cruises in Yangzi River. The experimental results show that this method is able to estimate the alignment parameters reliably. Besides, the alignment parameters can be employed for precision INS/DVL integrated navigation.