Design and validation of an attitude and heading reference system for an aerial robot prototype

In this paper we consider the design and the experimental validation of an attitude and heading reference system for a miniature aerial robot prototype based on measurements obtained from a low cost off-the-shelf inertial measurement unit. Different estimation algorithms to process the raw inertial data are implemented and validated in real indoor flight tests by employing, as a reference, the accurate attitude estimation obtained from a vision based motion tracking system. The proposed experiments allow to accurately evaluate the performance of the different estimation algorithms and the effects of disturbances, such as vehicle accelerations, vibrations and non ideal magnetic fields, in a typical scenario of application for the considered unmanned vehicle prototype.