Nonlinear Attitude Filtering: A Comparison Study
For researchers and engineers in robotics and aviation, this paper provides a clear comparison of attitude filters and demonstrates a new filter with superior performance.
The paper compares several nonlinear attitude filtering methods, including a second-order optimal minimum-energy filter proposed by the authors. In simulations, this filter outperforms all others, including the industry-standard multiplicative extended Kalman filter (MEKF).
This paper contains a concise comparison of a number of nonlinear attitude filtering methods that have attracted attention in the robotics and aviation literature. With the help of previously published surveys and comparison studies, the vast literature on the subject is narrowed down to a small pool of competitive attitude filters. Amongst these filters is a second-order optimal minimum-energy filter recently proposed by the authors. Easily comparable discretized unit quaternion implementations of the selected filters are provided. We conduct a simulation study and compare the transient behaviour and asymptotic convergence of these filters in two scenarios with different initialization and measurement errors inspired by applications in unmanned aerial robotics and space flight. The second-order optimal minimum-energy filter is shown to have the best performance of all filters, including the industry standard multiplicative extended Kalman filter (MEKF).