A Data Fusion System for Attitude Estimation of Low-cost Miniature UAVs

Miniature unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted wide interest from researchers and developers because of their broad applications. In order to make a miniature UAV platform popular for civilian applications, one critical concern is the overall cost. However, lower cost generally means lower navigational accuracy and insufficient flight control performance, mainly due to the low graded avionics on the UAV. This paper introduces a data fusion system based on several low-priced sensors to improve the attitude estimation of a low-cost miniature fixed-wing UAV platform. The characteristics of each sensor and the calculation of attitude angles are carefully studied. The algorithms and implementation of the fusion system are described and explained in details. Ground test results with three sensor fusions are compared and analyzed, and flight test comparison results with two sensor fusions are also presented