LAUSR

Abstract Attention has been devoted to distributed position and orientation system (DPOS) which can provide high precision spatial and temporal information for all remote sensing loads for airborne multi-task synthetical earth observation system in recent years. Since there are restrictions of space, weight and cost of the DPOS, it is unrealistic to install an IMU of DPOS at the location of each load, and the optimized layout of DPOS has become an urgent problem should be solved. However, there is no report on the optimized layout method for airborne DPOS yet. In this paper, the optimized layout of DPOS is classified as the optimization problem, and two classical optimization algorithms, the genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO), and two novel optimization algorithms, the particle swarm optimization with mutation (PSOM) and hybrid of PSO and GA (HPSOGA), are used and compared for the first time to determine the optimal layout of DPOS. The mathematical simulation shows that the novel method named HPSOGA is superior to the other three methods. In order to accelerate the convergence rate of this layout method, further mathematical simulation and semi-physical simulation based on flight experiment is carried out and the results show that the calculation amount of this method can be reduced by adjusting the individual number calculated by PSO. The work of this paper can provide new ideas and make a good start for the optimized layout study of DPOS.