Nonlinear State Estimation for Inertial Navigation Systems With Intermittent Measurements

TL;DR

This paper introduces hybrid nonlinear observers for inertial navigation that estimate attitude, position, and velocity using continuous and intermittent measurements, demonstrating stability and effectiveness through simulations and experiments.

Contribution

It presents two novel hybrid nonlinear observer designs for inertial navigation with intermittent measurements, including fixed-gain and variable-gain approaches.

Findings

Observers are exponentially stable with large domains of attraction.

Simulation and experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

The methods handle intermittent landmark measurements effectively.

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of simultaneous estimation of the attitude, position and linear velocity for vehicles navigating in a three-dimensional space. We propose two types of hybrid nonlinear observers using continuous angular velocity and linear acceleration measurements as well as intermittent landmark position measurements. The first type relies on a fixed-gain design approach based on an infinite-dimensional optimization, while the second one relies on a variable-gain design approach based on a continuous-discrete Riccati equation. For each case, we provide two different observers with and without the estimation of the gravity vector. The proposed observers are shown to be exponentially stable with a large domain of attraction. Simulation and experimental results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed observers.