LAUSR

Transfer alignment of array position and orientation system (POS) is the key technology to provide relative motion information for array synthetic aperture radar (SAR) high-precision imaging. The traditional method ignores the rigid lever-arm that is hardly to be measured accurately between fiber Bragg grating (FBG) and slave inertial measurement unit (SIMU), which will seriously restrain the transfer alignment precision. To solve this problem, a novel transfer alignment method of array POS based on lever-arm estimation is proposed. First, the rigid lever-arm estimation approach on the ground is presented. Second, the transfer alignment method based on the estimated rigid lever arm is proposed to obtain the high-precision relative motion between the main inertial measurement unit (MIMU) and SIMU. Finally, the experimental results indicate that the proposed method not only can estimate the lever arm and measure the relative motion accurately compared to the traditional method but also has a higher accuracy than FBG measurement.