Fine initial alignment is vital to the Inertial Navigation System (INS) before the launching of a missile. The existing initial alignment methods are mainly performed on a stationary base after the missile has been erected to the vertical state. However, these methods consume extra alignment time and some state variables have poor degrees of observability, thus losing the rapidity of alignment. In order to solve the problem, a fast fine initial self-alignment method of a missile-borne INS is proposed, which is performed during the erecting process on a stationary base. The convected Euler angle error is modelled to optimise the erecting manoeuvre which can prevent large Euler angle errors and improve the system observability. The fine initial alignment model is established to estimate and correct the initial misalignment. Several experiments verify that the proposed method is effective for improving the rapidity of the fine initial alignment for a missile-borne INS.
