Evaluating Sensor Orientations for Navigation Performance and Failure Detection

A study of the constraints imposed by the choice of particular orientations of redundant inertial sensors upon navigation system performance and the detection and identification of sensor failures in fault-tolerant inertial measurement units is presented. Figures of merit are derived for systematically evaluating alternative sensor orientations. The volume of the ellipsoid associated with the covariance matrix of estimation errors is used to rank sensor orientations in terms of navigation performance. Distance measures commonly used in hypothesis testing are used to rank sensor orientations in terms of the detectability of sensor failures. The application of these results is illustrated for configurations of four 2-degree-of-freedom gyroscopes.