AGISim, An Open Source Airborne Gimbal Mounted IMU Signal Simulator Considering Flight Dynamics Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces and evaluates an open-source simulator for airborne gimbal-mounted IMU signals that incorporates flight dynamics, aiding the development and testing of stabilized navigation and surveying systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel, comprehensive IMU signal simulator considering flight dynamics for gimbal-mounted setups, with open-source MATLAB code for broader accessibility.

Findings

Simulator effectively models gimbal-mounted IMU signals with flight dynamics.

Validation through unit and functional tests confirms simulator accuracy.

Open-source release facilitates research and development in stabilized navigation systems.

Abstract

In this work we present more comprehensive evaluations on our airborne Gimbal mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) signal simulator which also considers flight dynamic model (FDM). A flexible IMU signal simulator is an enabling tool in design, development, improvement, test and verification of aided inertial navigation systems (INS). Efforts by other researchers had been concentrated on simulation of the strapdown INS (SINS) with the IMU rigidly attached to the moving body frame. However custom airborne surveying/mapping applications that need pointing and stabilizing camera or any other surveying sensor, require mounting the IMU beside the sensor on a Gimbal onboard the airframe. Hence the proposed Gimbal mounted IMU signal simulator is of interest whilst itself requires further analysis and verifications. Extended evaluation results in terms of both unit tests and functional/integration tests (using aided inertial navigation algorithms with variable/dynamic lever arms), verifies the simulator and its applicability for the mentioned tasks. We have further packaged and published our MATLAB code for the proposed simulator as an open source GitHub repository.