Development of AHRS (Attitude and Heading Reference System) for Autonomous UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle)

Abstract

This paper describes an attitude and heading system development based on inertial and magnetic sensors. This system will use triad of orthogonal accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers to measure gravity vector, angular rate vector and earth magnetic field vector. The mechanization involved integration of angular rate measurement from gyroscope that enables high update rate but have unbounded error due to integration error and drift. To bound the error, this integrative measurement will be combined with absolute measurement from magnetometer and accelerometer using Wahba Problem formulation and TRIAD algorithm. The fusion algorithm used is Kalman Filter.