Multi-sensor fusion method using MARG for a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle

This paper designs a fixed-wing UAV postural reference system, which uses magnetometer, accelerometer and gyroscope (MARG) to perform the attitude measurement of high precision. A quaternion is calculated using Gyroscope sensor by means of quaternion algorithm, and we can get another quaternion using Magnetometer and Accelerometer sensor in the same way. The postural data are calculated using both two quaternions by two data fusion methods, adaptive complementary filter and extended Kalman filter, respectively. We compared data precision from the two filter methods in experiments. The results show that both this two fusion methods can meet the required precision of attitude data, in which Kalman filter method is more accurate than adaptive complementary filter although the latter is simpler and more practical than the former.