Uncertainty Propagation for Inertial Navigation with Coning, Sculling, and Scrolling Corrections

This paper investigates the propagation of estimation errors through a common coning, sculling, and scrolling architecture used in modern-day inertial navigation systems. Coning, sculling, and scrolling corrections often have an unaccounted for effect on the error statistics of inertial measurements used to describe the state and uncertainty propagation for position, velocity, and attitude estimates. Through the development of an error analysis for a set of coning, sculling, and scrolling algorithms, mappings of the measurement and estimation errors through the correction term are adaptively generated. Using the developed mappings, an efficient and consistent propagation of the state and uncertainty, within the multiplicative extended Kalman filter architecture, is achieved. Monte Carlo analysis is performed, and results show that the developed system has favorable attributes when compared to the traditional mechanization.