Estimating body-fixed frame velocity and attitude from inertial measurements for a quadrotor vehicle

Abstract

Abstract-A key requirement for effective control of quadrotor vehicles is estimation of both attitude and linear velocity. Recent work has demonstrated that it is possible to measure horizontal velocities of a quadrotor vehicle from strap-down accelerometers along with a system model. In this paper we extend this to full body-fixed-frame velocity measurement by exploiting recent work in aerodynamic modeling of rotor performance and measurements of mechanical power supplied to the rotor hub. We use these measurements in a combined attitude and velocity nonlinear observer design to jointly estimate attitude and bodyfixed-frame linear velocity. Almost global asymptotic stability of the resulting system is demonstrated using Lyapunov analysis of the resulting error system. In the current work, we ignore bias and leave it for future work. The performance of the observer is verified by simulation results.

Velocity aided attitude estimation for aerial robotic vehicles using latent rotation scaling

“…To obtain the velocity measurement in the vertical direction (V z ), [4], [2] proposed the concept of using aerodynamic power. Given that the PX4 is fitted with a barometer, we therefore do not use the aerodynamic power approach.…”

“…The paper takes a similar approach to the recent paper by the authors [2], by estimating a matrix that is more general than the full rotation matrix in order to simplify the Lyapunov stability analysis. In this paper, only a single degree of freedom is added to the observer state; that is we estimate a scaled rotation X = uR for R ∈ SO(3) and u ∈ R + , rather than estimating a rotation in SO(3) directly.…”

Supervisory Control of Multirotor Vehicles in Challenging Conditions Using Inertial Measurements

“…Velocity aided attitude estimation combines these two state estimation problems into a single observation problem. The vehicle's linear velocity measurements can be posed in either the inertial frame [36], [37], [38] or in the body fixed frame [39], [40], [41]. Bonnabel [42] proposed an invariant extended Kalman filter (EKF) for velocity and attitude estimation in quaternions.…”

“…developed nonlinear observers based on Lyapunov analysis and approximation arguments [36], [45]. The authors prior work [39], [40] also considers the problem from a nonlinear observer design perspective in the body-fixed frame.…”

A semi-global model-based state observer for the quadrotor using only inertial measurements

“…Notice that a different approach but similar in spirit, i.e. a nonlinear observer based on an enhanced aerodynamic model, is proposed in [5].…”