Enhanced Attitude Determination with IMU using Estimation of Lever Arms

Abstract

Abstract:In this paper, an enhanced method for attitude determination is proposed for systems using an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit). In attitude determination with IMU, it is generally assumed that the IMU can be located in the center of gravity on the vehicle. If the IMU is not located in the center of gravity, the accelerometers of the IMU are disturbed from additive accelerations such as centripetal acceleration and tangential acceleration. Additive accelerations are derived from the lever arm which is the distance between the center of gravity and the position of the IMU. The performance of estimation errors can be maintained in system with a non-zero lever arm, if the lever arm is estimated to remove the additive accelerations from the accelerometer's measurements. In this paper, an estimation using Kalman filter is proposed to include the lever arm in the state variables of the state space equation. For the Kalman filter, the process model and the measurement model for attitude determination are made up by using quaternion. In order to evaluate the proposed algorithm, both of the simulations and the experiments are performed for the simplified scenario of motion.