Drift-free attitude estimation for accelerated rigid bodies (Q1433067)

A rigid body, moving in the inertial space in the presence of gravity, is supplied with 3-axes gyro and 3-axis accelerometer. The gyro measures the angular velocity in the body fixed frame and the accelerometer measures the sum of inertial forces and gravity in this frame. The body rotation kinematics is written in the linear form by use of equations, describing moving of the vertical unit vector in the body fixed frame. It makes possible to apply a linear Kalman filter for the body attitude estimation. The proposed switching algorithm consists of two modes: one for low and one for high accelerations. The gyro drift is neglected in the analysis, but simulations show, that the algorithm can work with gyro biases. These results are aimed at the application for walking robots.