Fast Linear Attitude Estimation and Angular Rate Generation

International audienceThis paper focuses on the design of an approach to estimate attitude Euler angles and virtual gyroscope output based on a linear Kalman filter and attitude information compensation. First, the rotation transformation is built between the body frame and the reference frame by means of an accelerometer-magnetometer triad. The attitude quaternion is invoked for parameterization of orientation which leads to the Kalman filter fusing also the angular rate measurements. Furthermore, to compute the virtual-gyro output in the case of gyroscope failures and obtain bias-free angular rate estimates, virtual gyro Kalman filter is that forms a novel angular rate estimation approach. Some experiment scenarios are given to illustrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed attitude and angular rate estimation approaches