An Airborne and Gimbal Mounted IMU Signal Simulator Considering Flight Dynamics Model

A proper inertial measurement unit (IMU) signal simulator is a fundamental requirement in design, development, improvement, test and verification ofintegrated inertial navigation systems (INS). Current efforts on this topic focus on simulation of strapdown INS (SINS) with the IMU rigidly attached to themoving platform frame. However in some custom applications such as pointing a stabilized camera or a surveying sensor, it is necessary to mount the IMU ona ۲- or ۳-degrees of freedom (DoF) Gimbal. It is important to capture IMU average acceleration and rotation rate signals and to estimate the accurateposition, velocity and attitude of the gimbal/sensor frame to be used for both pointing stabilization and compensation of motion effects on the observationscaptured by the surveying sensor(s). Hence a Gimbal mounted IMU signal simulator is of high interest. We present such an IMU signal simulator that is onboard a simulated aircraft with realistic flight dynamics model (FDM) and ۳DoF Gimbal model. It enables thorough evaluation of aided inertial navigation algorithms with ariable/dynamic lever arms in both simulated and hardware-in-loop (HIL) cases. The proposed simulator is validated by unit and functional tests.