Gravity Modeling and Validation for High Accuracy Navigation Computation

Errors in inertial navigation system(INS) can be divided into two major groups which are system related errors and modeling errors due to approximation and linearization. Measurement noise, calibration, and alignment errors make up the first group, whereas the uncertainties in the gravity vector fall in the second category and are important error source for high quality INS, especially during high altitude and and/or long time missions, when the gravity errors tent to build up. The quality of a medium to high accuracy INS depends on the knowledge of the local gravity field. In this paper, the feasibility of improving airborns INS by use of more accurate gravity model is studied. To make consistent comparisons, WGS-84 parameters are used and ...