Riccati observers for velocity-aided attitude estimation of accelerated vehicles using coupled velocity measurements

TL;DR

This paper introduces Riccati nonlinear observers for attitude estimation of accelerated vehicles by fusing body-fixed and inertial velocity measurements, providing stability analysis and promising simulation results.

Contribution

It proposes a novel Riccati observer design for velocity-aided attitude estimation, extending EKF concepts with stability guarantees and large convergence domains.

Findings

Observers achieve local exponential stability.

Simulation shows large domain of convergence.

Effective fusion of velocity measurements enhances estimation.

Abstract

Motivated by drone autonomous navigation applications we address a novel problem of velocity-aided attitude estimation by combining two linear velocity components measured in a body-fixed frame and a linear velocity component measured in an inertial frame with the measurements of an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). The main contributions of the present paper are the design of Riccati nonlinear observers, which may be viewed as deterministic versions of an Extended Kalman filter (EKF), and an analysis of observability conditions under which local exponential stability of the observer is achieved. Reported simulation results further indicate that the observers' domain of convergence is large.