Attitude Tracking for Rigid Bodies Using Vector and Biased Gyro Measurements

TL;DR

This paper develops advanced control schemes for rigid-body attitude tracking using vector and biased gyro measurements, featuring a gyro-bias observer, stability guarantees, and an adaptive controller that handles unknown inertia without explicit attitude estimation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel adaptive attitude tracking controller that operates without explicit attitude estimation and manages unknown inertia using only low-cost IMU measurements.

Findings

Gyro-bias observer with global exponential stability

Almost global asymptotic stability of the tracking controller

Effective adaptive control under noisy measurements

Abstract

The rigid-body attitude tracking using vector and biased gyro measurements with unknown inertia matrix is studied in this note. First, a gyro-bias observer with global exponential stability is designed. Then, an attitude tracking controller based on this observer is devised, ensuring almost global asymptotic stability and almost semiglobal exponential stability. A separation property of the combined observer-controller is proved. Lastly, an adaptive attitude tracking controller relying on a modified gyro-bias observer and with no over-parametrization is developed to deal with the unknown inertia matrix. The proposed control schemes require neither an explicit attitude representation nor any attitude estimation, but only the measurement of at least two non-collinear known inertial reference vectors and biased gyro rate, which can be obtained by common low-cost IMU sensors. Simulations are included to illustrate the proposed adaptive controller under noisy measurements.