Inertial Measurements Based Velocity-free Attitude Stabilization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel velocity-free attitude stabilization method that solely uses inertial vector measurements, eliminating the need for attitude reconstruction or angular velocity data, and avoiding unwinding issues.

Contribution

It presents a new control scheme that stabilizes attitude without reconstructing orientation or measuring angular velocity, addressing a key limitation in existing methods.

Findings

Successfully stabilizes attitude using only inertial vectors.

Eliminates the unwinding phenomenon common in quaternion-based controllers.

Does not require attitude reconstruction or angular velocity measurements.

Abstract

The existing attitude controllers (without angular velocity measurements) involve explicitly the orientation (\textit{e.g.,} the unit-quaternion) in the feedback. Unfortunately, there does not exist any sensor that directly measures the orientation of a rigid body, and hence, the attitude must be reconstructed using a set of inertial vector measurements as well as the angular velocity (which is assumed to be unavailable in velocity-free control schemes). To overcome this \textit{circular reasoning}-like problem, we propose a velocity-free attitude stabilization control scheme relying solely on inertial vector measurements. The originality of this control strategy stems from the fact that the reconstruction of the attitude as well as the angular velocity measurements are not required at all. Moreover, as a byproduct of our design approach, the proposed controller does not lead to the unwinding phenomenon encountered in unit-quaternion based attitude controllers.