MAV quaternion attitude determination for accelerometer-magnetometer combination: Internal analysis

Abstract

Abstract This paper proposes a novel fast deterministic quaternion attitude determination method for accelerometer and magnetometer combination (AMC). After taking insight to the attitude determination theory, an important relationship between the sensor outputs and the magnetometer’s reference vector is successfully derived. Based on the relationship, the optimal quaternion associated with the attitude of a certain object is easily calculated. The main breakthrough of this paper is that it significantly simplifies the determination of the magnetometer’s reference vector which always needs systematic calibration or iterative estimation in existing methods. We name the proposed method the Fast Accelerometer-Magnetometer Fusion (FAMF). Our proposed method has the advantages of better computation accuracy and less time consumption. Several experiments are carried out to illustrate the attitude determination results. Besides, comparisons with existing representative methods are also presented in the experimental section of this paper, which verify the effectiveness of the proposed FAMF. Finally, we experimentally show that the FAMF’s roll and pitch angles are immune to magnetic distortion, which ensures the robustness under complex environments for micro air vehicles (MAV).