An IMU Evaluation Method Using a Signal Grafting Scheme.
As various inertial measurement units (IMUs) from different manufacturers appear every year, it is not affordable to evaluate every IMU through tests. Therefore, this paper presents an IMU evaluation method by grafting data from the tested IMU to the reference data from a higher-grade IMU. The signal grafting (SG) method has several benefits: (a) only one set of field tests with a higher-grade IMU is needed, and can be used to evaluate numerous IMUs. Thus, SG is effective and economic because all data from the tested IMU is collected in the lab; (b) it is a general approach to compare navigation performances of various IMUs by using the same reference data; and, finally, (c) through SG, one can first evaluate an IMU in the lab, and then decide whether to further test it. Moreover, this paper verified the validity of SG to both medium- and low-grade IMUs, and presents and compared two SG strategies, i.e., the basic-error strategy and the full-error strategy. SG provided results similar to field tests, with a difference of under 5% and 19.4%-26.7% for tested tactical-grade and MEMS IMUs. Meanwhile, it was found that dynamic IMU errors were essential to guarantee the effect of the SG method.
GNSS Research Center, Wuhan University, No.129, Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China. xjniu@whu.edu.cn.
Xiaoji
X
Niu
GNSS Research Center, Wuhan University, No.129, Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China. wang_qiang@whu.edu.cn.
Qiang
Q
Wang
GNSS Research Center, Wuhan University, No.129, Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China. liyou331@gmail.com.|Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N1N4, Canada. liyou331@gmail.com.
You
Y
Li
GNSS Research Center, Wuhan University, No.129, Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China. zhangquan@whu.edu.cn.|Collaborative Innovation Center for Geospatial Information Technology, Wuhan University, No.129, Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China. zhangquan@whu.edu.cn.
Quan
Q
Zhang
GNSS Research Center, Wuhan University, No.129, Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China. jiangp@whu.edu.cn.
Peng
P
Jiang
Inertial Measurement Units; field testing; hybrid simulation; navigation; performance evaluation; signal grafting