Indirect Kalman Filter based Sensor Fusion for Error Compensation of Low-Cost Inertial Sensors and Its Application to Attitude and Position Determination of Small Flying robot

Abstract

This paper presents a sensor fusion method based on indirect Kalman filter(IKF) for error compensation of low-cost inertial sensors and its application to the determination of attitude and position of small flying robots. First, the analysis of the measurement error characteristics to zero input is performed, focusing on the bias due to the temperature variation, to derive a simple nonlinear bias model of low-cost inertial sensors. Moreover, from the experimental results that the coefficients of this bias model possess non-deterministic (stochastic) uncertainties, the bias of low-cost inertial sensors is characterized as consisting of both deterministic and stochastic bias terms. Then, IKF is derived to improve long term stability dominated by the stochastic bias error, fusing low-cost inertial sensor measurements compensated by the deterministic bias model with non-inertial sensor measurement. In addition, in case of using intermittent non-inertial sensor measurements due to the unreliable data link, the upper and lower bounds of the state estimation error covariance matrix of discrete-time IKF are analyzed by solving stochastic algebraic Riccati equation and it is shown that they are dependant on the throughput of the data link and sampling period. To evaluate the performance of proposed method, experimental results of IKF for the attitude determination of a small flying robot are presented in comparison with that of extended Kaman filter which compensates only deterministic bias error model.