In airborne MEMS SINS transfer alignment, the error of MEMS IMU is highly environment-dependent and the parameters of the system model are also uncertain, which may lead to large error and bad convergence of the Kalman filter. In order to solve this problem, an improved adaptive incremental Kalman filter (AIKF) algorithm is proposed. First, the model of SINS transfer alignment is defined based on the “Velocity and Attitude” matching method. Then the detailed algorithm progress of AIKF and its recurrence formulas are presented. The performance and calculation amount of AKF and AIKF are also compared. Finally, a simulation test is designed to verify the accuracy and the rapidity of the AIKF algorithm by comparing it with KF and AKF. The results show that the AIKF algorithm has better estimation accuracy and shorter convergence time, especially for the bias of the gyroscope and the accelerometer, which can meet the accuracy and rapidity requirement of transfer alignment.

The performance of MEMS-SINS/GPS integrated system degrades evidently during GPS outage due to the poor error characteristics of low-cost IMU sensors. The normal EKF is unable to estimate SINS error accurately after GPS outage owing to the large nonlinear error caused by MEMS-IMU. Aiming to solve this problem, a hybrid KF-UKF algorithm for real-time SINS/GPS integration is presented in this paper. The linear and nonlinear SINS error models are discussed, respectively. When GPS works well, we fuse SINS and GPS with KF with linear SINS error model using normal EKF. In the case of GPS outage, we implement Unscented Transform to predict SINS error covariance with nonlinear SINS error model until GPS signal recovers. In the simulation test that we designed, an evident accuracy improvement in attitude and velocity could be noticed compared to the normal EKF method after the GPS signal recovered.