Deformation measuring methods based on inertial sensors for airborne distributed POS

This paper is focused on deformation measuring methods based on inertial sensors, which is used to achieve high accuracy motion parameters and the spatial distribution optimization of muti-slave systems in airborne distributed Position and Orientation System (POS) or other purposes. In practical application, the installation difficulty, cost and accuracy of measuring equipment are the key factors need to be considered synthetically. Motivated by these, the deformation measurement methods based on gyros and accelerometers are proposed respectively and compared with the traditional method based on Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). The mathematical models of these proposed methods are built, and the detailed derivations of them are given. Based on the Kalman filtering estimation, flight simulation and semi-physical simulation based on vehicle experiment show that the method based on gyros can obtain the similar estimation accuracy with the method based on IMU, and the method based on accelerometers has an advantage in y-axis deformation angle estimation.