Improved Transversal Polar Navigation Mechanism for Strapdown INS using Ellipsoidal Earth Model

Abstract

As the geographical meridians converge rapidly, traditional inertial navigation methods fail in the polar regions. Classic transversal navigation methods can address the problem by transversal rotation of the original north and south poles, but this can introduce errors based on the spherical Earth model. To reduce the principle errors, some fruitful research work using an ellipsoidal Earth model has been done. Under the ellipsoid Earth model, transversal navigation for polar region becomes a complex coupling problem. Considering the coupling of the three-dimensional motion, a more rigorous mechanism for transversal navigation using an ellipsoidal Earth model is proposed. Starting from the relationship between Euclidean coordinates and spherical coordinates, the main equations of transversal polar navigation based on an ellipsoidal Earth model are derived in detail. Complete mechanical arrangements of attitude, position and velocity calculation are presented. The new derivation in this paper completely avoids solving the ellipsoidal radius. Numerical results indicate that the proposed transversal navigation mechanism can outperform the traditional method, especially in the condition of vertical motion.