An economic full attitude detector for aerial vehicle with precomputed trajectory

A novel real-time detector for full attitude determination of aerial vehicle was derived based on tri-axis MEMS gyro, tri-axis magnetometer and the precomputed trajectory information (PTI). With loaded PTI, the tri-axis magnetometer was able to independently estimate the attitude quaternion through a recursive algorithm. This quaternion, together with the angular rate vector determined by MEMS gyro, was used as input for a Kalman-based fusion algorithm. Thus, the Euler angles of the aerial vehicle were determined in real time. In addition, homemade prototype based on this fusion algorithm was developed and tested on single-axis turntable. The divergence of measurement errors of the fusion algorithm was compared with MEMS gyro based or magnetometer based algorithms, and the fusion algorithm showed best accuracy. This paper proved that low-cost full attitude detector with relatively high accuracy for aerial vehicle loaded with PTI is feasible.