Quaternion optimization based in-flight calibration approach for POS

Position and Orientation System (POS) is a key technology which provides motion compensation information for imaging sensor in airborne remote sensing. But precision of POS is degraded by gyroscope bias excursion as time flows, in-flight calibration is the most convenient way to solve this problem to the users, but the existing methods are mostly based on kalman filter, the effect of them to estimate the bias error is unpractical as affected severely by GPS measurement error and model error. On the basis of quaternion optimization based in-flight alignment approach, a novel airborne POS in-flight calibration approach based on quaternion optimization is devised in this paper, which adds the factor of attitude error promulgation by gyroscope bias error into the algorithm and gyroscope bias error is recognized by parse analysis. Flight experiments demonstrate that with the proposed algorithm the gyroscope bias error can be recognized in acceptable precision.