Attitude observer on the special orthogonal group with Earth velocity estimation

This paper proposes a new nonlinear attitude observer based on high-grade rate gyros and single body-fixed vector measurements of a constant inertial vector, in contrast with typical solutions that require two of these vectors. The structure is cascaded, where in the first block a vector that is related to the angular velocity of the Earth is estimated and in the second block the attitude itself is obtained. The attitude is directly estimated on the special orthogonal group and the estimation error is shown to converge to zero, with a region of convergence that is best described as semi-global, with local exponential convergence. Simulation results illustrate the achievable performance of the proposed solution and the robustness to sensor noise. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.