An Attitude Determination System For A Small Unmanned Helicopter Using Low-Cost Sensors

Attitude determination system (ADS) that use inexpensive sensors and are based on computationally efficient and robust algorithms are indispensable for real-time vehicle navigation, guidance and control application. This paper describes an attitude determination system that is based on accelerometer and rate gyro. The algorithm is based on a extended Kalman filter. Using integration of angular rates as state vector and the earth´s gravity as the measured vector, the attitude (roll and pitch) and gyro bias is estimated. At last, a discrete extended Kalman filter (EKF) implement of the same formulation is test on a small unmanned helicopter.