Sensor-based complementary globally asymptotically stable filters for attitude estimation

Abstract — This paper presents the design, analysis, and performance evaluation of globally asymptotically stable filters for attitude estimation. The design is based directly on the sensor measurements as opposed to traditional solutions that resort to parameterizations of the rotation, e.g., Euler angles or quaternions, or more recent geometric approaches explicitly solved on the special orthogonal group, SO(3). The proposed solutions include the estimation of gyro bias, incomplete sensor measurements, systematic tuning procedures, and also allow for the inclusion of frequency weights to model colored noise. Finally, and due to the inherent structure, the filters are comple-mentary and also cope well with slowly time-varying gyro bias. Simulation results are included that illustrate the achievable performance in the presence of realistic measurements provided by low-cost, low-power sensor suites. I