Implementation of a nonlinear attitude estimator for aerial robotic vehicles

Attitude estimation is a key component of the avionics suite of any aerial robotic vehicle. This paper details theoretical and practical solutions in order to obtain a robust nonlinear attitude estimator for flying vehicles equipped with low-cost sensors. The attitude estimator is based on a nonlinear explicit complementary filter that has been significantly enhanced with an effective gyro-bias compensation via the design of an anti-windup nonlinear integrator. A measurement decoupling strategy is proposed in order to make roll and pitch estimation robust to magnetic disturbances that are known to cause errors in yaw estimation. In addition, this paper discusses the fixed-point numerical implementation of the algorithm. Finally, simulation and experimental results confirm the performance of the proposed method.