Effects of Initial Attitude Estimation Errors on Loosely Coupled Smartphone GPS/IMU Integration System

Global Positioning System (GPS) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors are commonly integrated using the extended Kalman filter (EKF), for achieving better navigation performance. However, because of nonlinearity, the performance of the EKF is affected by the initial state estimation errors, and the navigation solutions, including the attitude, diverge rapidly as the initial errors increase. This paper analyzes the data obtained from an outdoor experiment, and investigates the effect of the initial errors on the attitude estimation performance using EKF, which is used in loosely coupled low-cost smartphone GPS/IMU sensors.