A Global and Exponential Nonlinear Observer for Rigid Body Pose Estimation with a Single Landmark Reading

In this research, a nonlinear observer is proposed in order to estimate the attitude and the position of a rigid body. The attitude and position information is provided by a time varying single landmark readings. Most existing attitude determination systems lack global convergence in light of topological limitations on Special Orthogonal group SO(3). However, we do not restrict the attitude estimation to evolve on SO(3) and hence we prove that the stability of the proposed observer is of global and exponential sense. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.