Design and Implementation of an MPSoC-Based IMU/GNSS/Polarization Integrated Navigation System

To address the insufficient heading constraint of integrated navigation systems under GNSS-denied conditions and the high computational burden of high-resolution polarization-image processing, an IMU/GNSS/sky-polarization integrated navigation system based on a Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC is designed and implemented. A PS–PL collaborative architecture is adopted, in which pixel-level polarization-image processing is accelerated in the programmable logic (PL). In contrast, frame-level polarization feature extraction, polarization-based heading estimation, and ESKF-based multi-source fusion are performed in the processing system (PS). The experimental results show that the average difference in AoP calculation between the IP core and the PC-based implementation is approximately 0.3∘. In four repeated experiments conducted under clear-sky conditions, the position-deviation MAE remains below 0.34 m, while the heading deviation is generally around 2∘. Three additional repeated experiments under cloudy conditions show that the position and heading deviations increase in some cases as the quality of the polarization observations decreases; nevertheless, the system maintains continuous and stable navigation solutions. Under a complete 120 s GNSS outage, the introduction of polarization-based heading observations reduces the heading MAE and RMSE by approximately 18% and 26%, respectively, demonstrating that polarization observations can effectively constrain inertial heading drift during prolonged GNSS outages.