On hybrid inertial navigation systems

Inertial navigation systems are self-contained navigation equipments, which are widely applied in all sorts of advanced vehicles in space, air, marine, and on land. The development process, advantages and drawbacks of platform-, strapdown- and rotatory-type inertial navigation systems are reviewed. Based on these, a new approach, namely hybrid inertial navigation system, is proposed, which combines the advantages of the above three types of inertial navigation systems. The conception, principle, characteristics and key techniques are presented, and the prototype experiment results demonstrate the superiority and feasibility of this novel approach, laying the technical foundation and pointing the research issues for its future development and application.