This paper provides algorithms to fuse relative and absolute microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) navigation sensors, suitable for micro planetary rovers, to provide a more accurate estimation of navigation information, specifically, attitude and position. Planetary rovers have extremely slow speed (~1 cm/s) and lack conventional navigation sensors/systems, hence the general methods of terrest...

A new approach for spacecraft absolute attitude estimation based on the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is extended to relative attitude estimation and navigation. This approach for nonlinear systems has faster convergence than the approach based on the standard extended Kalman filter (EKF) even with inaccurate initial conditions in attitude estimation and navigation problems. The filter formulat...

In the normal operation conditions of a pico satellite, conventional Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) gives sufficiently good estimation results. However, if the measurements are not reliable because of any kind of malfunction in the estimation system, UKF gives inaccurate results and diverges by time. This study, introduces Robust Unscented Kalman Filter (RUKF) algorithms with the filter gain cor...

The theoretical challenge involved in the operation of VTOL UAVs is often divided into two main problems. The first problem involves the development of an estimation scheme which can accurately recover the orientation, or angular position, of the aircraft. The second problem involves the development of algorithms which can be used to reliably control the orientation and/or the position of the v...

A GPS multi-antenna system consisting of multiple off-the-shelf GPS sensors has been successfully developed and extensively tested in operational marine environments. The advantages to use such a system are the flexibility in the selection of GPS sensors, the cost-effectiveness of the system with the emerging low-cost high performance GPS products and the increased productivity of equipment whi...

In order to reduce the computational complexity, and improve the pitch/roll estimation accuracy of the low-cost attitude heading reference system (AHRS) under conditions of magnetic-distortion, a novel linear Kalman filter, suitable for nonlinear attitude estimation, is proposed in this paper. The new algorithm is the combination of two-step geometrically-intuitive correction (TGIC) and the Kal...

Omnidirectional vision systems provide a large field of view, this property can benefit algorithms developed to solve robotic tasks. One interesting problem is the estimation of the rotation between omnidirectional images. Since the images taken by omnidirectional sensors can be mapped to a sphere, the problem of attitude estimation of a 3D camera rotation can be treated as a problem of estimat...

Precise control of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) or MAV (Micro Aerial Vehicle), requires the accurate determination of vehicle orientation. Attitude and heading reference systems (AHRS) are popularly used for vehicle orientation determination. In these systems, Euler angle estimation is more appropriate than quaternion estimation because the accelerometer measurement and magnetometer measuremen...