By measuring the acceleration (inertia) of a moving carrier and automatically performing integral operations, the technology to obtain its instantaneous speed and instantaneous position data is called inertial navigation, or inertial navigation for short. Since the equipment that composes the inertial navigation system is installed in a moving carrier, it does not rely on outside information, does not radiate energy to the outside world, and is not easily interfered by the external environment, so it is an autonomous navigation system.
Inertial navigation systems usually consist of inertial measurement devices, computers, and control displays. The inertial measurement device includes an accelerometer and a gyroscope (also known as an inertial navigation combination): the drift of the gyroscope will increase the angle measurement error in proportion to time; the constant error of the accelerometer will cause the error in proportion to the square of time Position error. These errors will not be damped and corrected, which will seriously affect the actual use, and simply adopting the method of improving the accuracy of instrument manufacturing can not eliminate the root cause, and will lead to a sharp increase in cost. The inertial navigation systems used today are often combined with navigation systems such as radio, Doppler and astronomy, which can not only achieve effective damping, but also correct errors, forming a high-precision integrated navigation system.