California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

A gyroscope-free inertial navigation system uses only accelerometers to compute navigation trajectories. It is a low-cost navigation system, but its output error diverges at a rate that is an order faster than that of a conventional gyroscope-based system. So integration with an external reference system, such as the Global Positioning System, is necessary for long-term navigation applications. In this pa-per, an integrated GPS and gyroscope-free INS system is designed to achieve stable long-term navigation. The linear and nonlinear error models of a gyroscope-free INS are derived and are used as Kalman filter equations to estimate the errors in the gyroscope-free INS data. The effects of gyroscope-free inertial measurement unit errors are also analyzed. By using computer simulations, the performance of the integrated GPS and gyroscope-free INS system is verified.