A transfer alignment method for airborne distributed POS with three-dimensional aircraft flexure angles

An airborne distributed position and orientation system (POS) appears to satisfy the requirement of multi-point motion parameters measurement. This relies on transfer alignment from a high precision master system to slave systems to obtain high accuracy motion parameters of all points. A key problem for a distributed POS involves determining a method to treat the aircraft flexure appropriately and achieve high precision transfer alignment. In this study, the effect of aircraft flexure on transfer alignment accuracy for airborne earth observation is first analyzed. Based on this, the error model of transfer alignment that considers three-dimensional flexure angles are established, and a transfer alignment based on parameter identification unscented Rauch-Tung-Striebel smoother (PIURTSS) is proposed. The simulations results show that the transfer alignment method based on PIURTSS effectively improves the estimation accuracy.