Utilization of sensor error flags for data estimation and data reliability estimation in inertial navigation

A system for inertial navigation applying Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), the system comprising:

• at least one inertial sensor device;
• and
• a computing device configured to perform an EKF calculation based on inertial sensor data received from the at least one inertial sensor device, the computing device that, when executing program code stored on memory, is configured to:
• detect a degraded quality of inertial sensor data provided by an inertial sensor device, the inertial sensor data relating to at least one inertial axis, and the degraded quality relating to at least one of a detecting of an error flag indicating an error of at least one type of inertial sensor data and a detecting of an absence of at least one type of incoming inertial sensor data;
• in response to detecting the degraded quality, temporarily increase a noise estimate used by the EKF for the inertial sensor data from a first noise estimate value to a second noise estimate value, the noise estimate relating to the at least one inertial axis or the inertial sensor associated with the inertial sensor data, and the second noise estimate value being greater than the first noise estimate value;
• detect a normalization of quality of the at least one type of inertial sensor data;
• and
• in response to the detecting of the normalization of quality, reset the temporarily increased noise estimate value used by the EKF back to the first noise estimate value after a predetermined delay period after detecting the normalization of quality.