Cubature Kalman Filter Based Attitude Estimation for Micro Aerial Vehicles

The attitude estimation problem of micro air vehicles (MAVs) is a nonlinear filtering problem, extend Kalman filter (EKF) suffers the problem of linearization error as well as unscented Kalman filter (UKF) has the problem of high time cost, cubature attitude estimation method for micro aerial vehicles was proposed. Attitude kinematics model based on Euler angles was established, attitude angle was treated as filter state and outputs of accelerometers and magnetometers were treated as measurements, and then the cubature numerical integration theory was used to calculate the mean and variance of the nonlinear function, on this basis cubature Kalman Filter (CKF) attitude estimation for micro aerial vehicles with multi-sensor assisted realized. Simulation results show that, the estimation accuracy of CKF is equivalent to UKF and better than EKF, likewise, the stability of CKF is equivalent to UKF and better than EKF, in terms of time consumption, CKF is better than UKF.