Abellera, Kobe Conrad R.

Alcaraz, Crister Kae R.

Pajarillo, Angela Mae V.
Placer, Ma. Andrea M.
Villareal, Patrick Jasper C.

Brief History of Inertial Navigation System

The
development
of
inertial
navigation systems has its origins at the
beginning of the twentieth century when
gyroscope-based
compasses
were
invented in Germany and used in ship
navigation. Early concepts or analogues
of navigation systems were developed
before and during World War II principally
by J. Gievers in Germany for marine and
land use (Stieler and Winter, 1982).
Aircraft navigation did not benefit until
after the War when systems for high
speed
vehicles
were
designed,
particularly by Charles Draper at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As
accuracies in gyros steadily improved and
digital electronic computers arrived, their
application quickly spread to commercial
and military aviation in the 1960s and
1970s, including missile guidance, and
also space navigation, notably the famed
manned lunar flights. Also marine
navigations continued to utilize these
systems, especially submarine navigation
that still today relies significantly on
inertial navigation. Inertial navigation
systems have been playing an important
role in submarine navigation, aiding
satellite and radio navigation and
precision, aircraft landing, autonomous
(jam-proof)
military
navigation
and
guidance, and even in surveying, as a
geodetic tool.
Application to Geodesy
Inherently, inertial navigation systems
are geodetic instruments. In general,
an inertial navigation system (INS)

comprises a set of inertial measurement

units (IMUs), both accelerometers and
gyros, the platform on which they are
mounted, including the stabilization
mechanism if so provided, and the
computer that performs the calculations
needed to transform sensed accelerations
and, in some mechanizations, angles or
angular rates into navigationally useful
information:
position,
velocity
and
altitude. That is precisely what an INS
does for a moving vehicle; it
determines the coordinates of the
vehicle along its trajectory. The twofold integration of sensed acceleration to
determine coordinate differences with
respect to a starting point deviates only
in concept from the more traditional
surveying technique of running a traverse
by measuring distances with tape or with
electronic distance meters and directions
(and angles) with a theodolite (or both
range and angles using a total station
surveying apparatus). Even the earliest
motivation for developing the gyroscope,
which of providing a reference direction
for marine navigation, was essentially
geodetic in nature. On the other hand,
modern geodesy deals with positional
accuracy on the order of 10 cm or often
much better; whereas, the INS by itself,
because of the cumulative character of its
errors,
is
generally
consigned
to
applications requiring accuracy worse by
three or four orders of magnitude, if
operated autonomously for periods as
short as one hour. Historically, these
applications resided mostly in coarse
navigational needs, where accuracy in
destination would suffice at the level of a
kilometer. This distinguishes the INS from
traditional geodetic instrumentation. Also,
its primary purpose of real-time operation
further deprives it of the usual, postmission, constrained adjustment of errors
that is the hallmark of geodesy. In fact,
real-time navigation and guidance were

the principal motivations to develop the

INS. Precise geodetic positioning (postmission) was rarely the stimulus to drive
the
inertial
technology
because
throughout INS development, geodesy
already had many established methods of
much higher accuracy at its deposal; and,
therefore, no immediate need existed to
incorporate the INS into its arsenal of
position determination techniques. Yet
the INS possesses some advantages
not easily duplicated by traditional
geodetic methods. These include the
speed with which the INS yields
measurements and the freedom from
the dependence on lines of sight
between survey points. The labor of
field surveying is the single most
expensive aspect of geodesy, and the
prospect of saving man-hours of work
in surveying a single point was
enough
to
motivate
several
investigators to consider the utility
of adapting the INS to geodetic
surveying applications.

Figure 1. Inertial Navigation System-equipped

Road-Scanner Mobile Mapping technology

Figure 2. Road-Scanner Mobile

technology mounted on a vehicle

Mapping

(Photos in Figures 1 and 2 are taken from

SITECO Brochure)

Inertial Survey System

As the name implies, an inertial survey
system is designed for precise
determination of point coordinates in
a geodetic network rather than for
real-time trajectory determination,
or navigation. Thus, while the sensor
assembly is an IMU (often adapted from
an INS) and the system dynamics
model is based on the usual
navigation equations for an Inertial
Navigation System, the data are
analyzed and processed with a sufficient
amount of external information to
maintain tight control on the well-known
accumulation of errors in order to achieve
geodetic levels of accuracy. The usual
application is the determination of the
three-dimensional coordinates of points
along a traverse that connects two points
with known coordinates. The points along
the traverse may be visited by a landvehicle or by a helicopter, and the time
spent to cover such a traverse typically
ranges from under one up to two or three
hours. Many traverses may be combined
to survey a longer traverse or an area
network of points. Although preliminary
solutions for the coordinates can be
determined in near real-time in the field
using a Kalman filter or smoother, best
results are obtained with a post-mission
least-squares adjustment of the entire
network. Thus, the inertial survey
incorporates several aspects or stages of
error control and optimization.
History of ISS
The origins of the inertial survey system
can be traced back to efforts by the U.S.
Army Engineer Topographic Laboratories

(USAETL) that in the early 1960's began

supporting research and development of
systems to measure precise positions
(three-dimensional) and azimuth in the
field in near real time. Fortuitously, this
development
just
followed
the
formulation and application of the Kalman
filter that is now the essence of optimal
error control in linear dynamic systems. It
was immediately applied to control the
inertial survey system errors using
external information such as velocity or
position updates. The first successful
geodetic
inertial
surveyor,
the
Position and Azimuth Determination

System (PADS), was developed by

Litton
Guidance
and
Control
Systems, Inc., in the early 1970's
(Huddle and Maughmer, 1972) in
response
to
USAETL
military
requirements. The goal with this system
was to demonstrate positioning accuracy
of 10 m in elevation and about 20 m in
horizontal position for missions up to 6
hours in duration. Also, the accuracy of
the estimated azimuth was to remain
under 1 arcmin during that time.
Originally outfitted with an odometer and
a laser velocimeter as external sensors to
control the growth of errors, the
occasional full stop of the system for
short duration proved to be a sufficient,
as well as more efficient, technique for
estimating errors of the system and thus

bounding the INS position errors.

Features of Inertial Surveying Systems
The speed of surveying is perhaps
the greatest advantage of the IS
over
other
systems.
Once
the
instrument is calibrated, the procedure of
surveying comes down to taking the
system from point to point. Unlike the
GPS, there is no need to stay still on
one place for a long time with the IS
because at any given moment we
know the position. That continuous
measuring is one of the important
advantages. It has a very high rate of
registration
whereas
the
GPS
requires
registrations
to
be
interpolated. In order to
survey the roads an
inertial
navigation
system
can
be
incorporated in a car.
While the car is moving
the
instrument
is
continuously
and
constantly
recording
the position and as a final product we get
a 3D model of the road. Therefore,
mapping the roads and other routes is
one of the geodetic tasks that are already
being performed. Next, the inertial
system is an extremely useful tool
because it doesnt measure only the
coordinates of the position, but virtually
all other geodetic quantities. It measures
the angle of the gravity line,
gravitational acceleration, azimuth
angle, altitude in reference to the
geoide mean sea level and also the
attitude and orientation of the
vehicle. That way only one instrument
can do the work of several other
instruments.

Figure 3. 3D road model given by inertial

survey (IS built-in vehicle) (Photo taken from
Ekscentar Magazine)

REFERENCES:
Buria, O. (2007, January 1). Inertia - The Future in Geodesy. Ekscentar. Retrieved March
16,
2015
from
hrcak.srce.hr/file/19244
Jekeli, C. (2001). Inertial Navigation Systems with Geodetic Applications (Illustrated ed.,
pp. 101, 295-297). Columbus, Ohio: Walter de Gruyter.
SITECO. (n.d.). Road Scanner 4 Mobile Mapping System [Brochure]. Bologna, Italy: SITECO
Informatica. Retrieved
March
16,
2015
from
http://www.sitecoinf.it/pdf/brochure/brochure_roadscanner4_english
.pdf