Geomagnetic Sensor Compensation and Sensor Fusion for Quadrotor Heading Direction Control

Abstract

Geomagnetic sensors are widely utilized for sensing heading direction of quadrotors. However, measurement from a geomagnetic sensor is easily corrupted by environmental magnetic field interference and roll/pitch directional motion. In this paper, a measurement method of a quadrotor heading direction is proposed for application to yaw attitude control. In order to eliminate roll/pitch directional motion effect, the geomagnetic sensor data is compensated using the roll/pitch angles measured for stabilization control. In addition, yaw-directional angular velocity data from a gyroscope sensor is fused with the geomagnetic sensor data using a complementary filter which is a simple and intuitive sensor fusion method. The proposed method is applied to experiments, and the results are presented to prove validity and effectiveness of the proposed method.