Accuracy Assessment of Inertial Navigation Computation without Initial Attitude Alignment

The inertial navigation algorithmic accuracy is typically evaluated by the analytical error analysis or simulation. An accurate assessment of the inertial navigation algorithm through experiment data is expected to fully convince practitioners to switch to a theoretically sound algorithm. However, it is nontrivial to isolate the influence of other error factors and assess the mere contribution of the inertial navigation computation by real test data. In this paper, an inertial navigation attitude, velocity, and position accuracy assessment method is proposed by utilizing experiment data, which does not require the initial alignment of the system. Finally, by the proposed method, this paper assesses the recent iNavFIter against the traditional multi-sample inertial navigation algorithms.