Inertial Attitude and Position Reference System Development for a Small UAV

This article presents an inexpensive inertial attitude and position reference system for a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that utilizes low cost inertial sensors in conjunction with a global positioning system (GPS) sensor. The attitude estimates are obtained from a complementary filter and a Kalman filter by combining the measurements from the inertial sensors with the supplementary attitude information from GPS. A method is proposed to deal with the GPS data latency and momentary outages. The inertial position is estimated from a separate Kalman filter that is cascaded after the attitude filters in order to reduce the computational overhead. Numerical simulation results and hardware validation show that this is a simple, yet effective method for attitude and position estimation, suitable for real-time implementation on a small UAV.