10.33012/navi.742">
 

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-23-2026

Abstract

Inertial measurement units (IMUs) are central to global navigation satellite system-based and alternative navigation solutions. This paper combines three lines of research to explore a novel methodology for using inertial sensors: factor graphs, spline-based trajectory estimation, and high-grade inertial sensing. Spline-based factor-graph trajectory estimation is increasingly used in the literature, especially for asynchronous or high-rate sensors. However, prior models neglect the impact of the Earth’s rotation, which is significant for high-grade IMUs. We extend spline-based factor graphs to incorporate accelerometer and gyroscope models that account for the Earth’s rotation. We apply this approach to simulated data from high-grade inertial sensors for two evaluations. First, we evaluate the estimation accuracy using the proposed approach and demonstrate a consistent one-order-of-magnitude improvement after 60 s of inertial coasting when compared with the literature’s spline-based approaches with coarse inertial measurement models. Then, we compare two spline-based trajectory representations applied to high-grade inertial navigation.

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© 2026 Institute of Navigation

This article is published by ION, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. 

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Source Publication

NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation (ISSN 0028-1522 | eISSN 2161-4296)

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