Sensor Bias Ambiguity in GNSS-IMU Pose Estimation and its Solution
Copyright (c) 2026 Bauer Péter
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Abstract
This article deals with the topic of pose and sensor bias estimation based on global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) measurements, which is a widely
discussed topic but usually by omitting the rigorous check of state observability leading to the
suspicion of invalid assumptions. The current work underlines this suspicion by pointing out through
observability calculations that to estimate position, velocity, orientation and acceleration, and
angular rate biases of a system, orientation-related measurements should be included besides
GNSS position and velocity data. Such measurement can be the magnetic vector. Theoretical results are underlined by tests considering real flight GNSS and IMU data of a DJI M600 Pro multicopter and comparing the results to the onboard DJI pose estimator.
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References
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