Quaternion Kalman filter for inertial measurement units

• Published in: 2017 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS) pp. 1037 - 1043
• Main Authors: Cariño Escobar, Jossue, Cabarbaye, Aurelien, Bonilla Estrada, Moises, Lozano, Rogelio
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2017
• Subjects: Accelerometers; Gravity; Magnetic separation; Magnetometers; Mathematical model; Quaternions; Sensors
• DOI: 10.1109/ICUAS.2017.7991369

This paper presents a theoretical and practical implementation of a Kalman Filter (KF) to obtain the attitude and angular velocity from a nine degrees of freedom (DoF) inertial measurement unit (IMU). These include three DoF from an accelerometer, three from a magnetometer and the last three from a gyroscope. It differs from other attitude filters in two main aspects, the model representation and how the information is acquired from the IMU. The quaternion model presented has an analogous linear representation that can be used, in conjunction with the the an algorithm that is presented in order to extract the attitude information from the IMU, leading to a considerable lower computational cost in order to avoid the calculation of Jacobians matrices or gradients.