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In this paper, we present a model-based observer for inertial navigation of quadrotors and other multirotor aircraft. We include in our model a Coriolis term that has been neglected in prior work. Doing so allows us to estimate the entire velocity vector in the quadrotor's frame of reference-including along the z-axis of this frame-with data only from a low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU): something that has not been demonstrated previously. An observability analysis predicts that our proposed observer will perform well. Experimental results over 110 flight trials verify this prediction, showing that our proposed observer achieves lower root mean square error than three other stateof-the-art model-based observers.

This paper addresses the problem of choosing a sparse subset of measurements for quick calibration parameter estimation. A standard solution to this is selecting a measurement only if its utility-the difference between posterior (with the measurement) and prior information (without the measurement)-exceeds some threshold. Theoretically, utility, a function of the parameter estimate, should be evaluated at the estimate obtained with all measurements selected so far, hence necessitating a recalibration with each new measurement. However, we hypothesize that utility is insensitive to changes in the parameter estimate for many systems of interest, suggesting that evaluating utility at some initial parameter guess would yield equivalent results in practice. We provide evidence supporting this hypothesis for extrinsic calibration of multiple inertial measurement units (IMUs), showing the reduction in calibration time by two orders of magnitude by forgoing recalibration for each measurement.