An efficient attitude reference system design using velocity differential vectors under weak acceleration dynamics

Abstract

This paper proposes a new method achieving computationally efficient attitude reference system for low cost strapdown sensors and microprocessor platform. The main idea in this method is to define and compare velocity differential vectors, geometrically computed from INS and GPS data with different update rate, for generating attitude error measurements which is further used for filter construction. A quaternion based Kalman filter configuration is applied for the attitude estimation with the adapted measurement model of differential vector comparison. Linearized model for Extended Kalman Filter and low pass filtered characteristics of measurement greatly extend the affordability of the proposed algorithm to the field of simple low cost embedded systems. For performance verification, experiment are done employing a practical low cost MEMS IMU and GPS receiver specification. Performance comparison with a high grade navigation system demonstrated good estimation result.