Rigid body attitude estimation based on the Lagrange–d’Alembert principle

Estimation of rigid body attitude and angular velocity without any knowledge of the attitude dynamics model is treated using the Lagrange–d’Alembert principle from variational mechanics. It is shown that Wahba’s cost function for attitude determination from two or more non-collinear vector measurements can be generalized and represented as a Morse function of the attitude estimation error on the Lie group of rigid body rotations. With body-fixed sensor measurements of direction vectors and angular velocity, a Lagrangian is obtained as the difference between a kinetic energy-like term that is quadratic in the angular velocity estimation error and an artificial potential obtained from Wahba’s function. An additional dissipation term that depends on the angular velocity estimation error is introduced, and the Lagrange–d’Alembert principle is applied to the Lagrangian with this dissipation. A Lyapunov analysis shows that the state estimation scheme so obtained provides stable asymptotic convergence of state estimates to actual states in the absence of measurement noise, with an almost global domain of attraction. These estimation schemes are discretized for computer implementation using discrete variational mechanics. A first order Lie group variational integrator is obtained as a discrete-time implementation. In the presence of bounded measurement noise, numerical simulations show that the estimated states converge to a bounded neighborhood of the actual states.     

Angular velocity observer for attitude tracking on SO(3) with the separation property

This paper studies a rigid body attitude tracking control problem with attitude measurements only, when angular velocity measurements are not available. An angular velocity observer is constructed such that the estimated angular velocity is guaranteed to converge to the true angular velocity asymptotically from almost all initial estimates. As it is developed directly on the special orthogonal group, which completely avoids singularities, complexities, or discontinuities caused by minimal attitude representations or quaternions. Then, the presented observer is integrated with a proportional-derivative attitude tracking controller to show a separation type property, where exponential stability is guaranteed for the combined observer and attitude control system.     

Finite time stable attitude estimation of rigid bodies with unknown dynamics

An almost global finite time stable attitude estimation scheme for a rigid body that does not require the knowledge of the dynamics or the probability distribution of the sensor noise is presented. The attitude of the rigid body is estimated from measurements of at least two linearly independent known vectors and the angular velocity in the body‐fixed frame. The estimation scheme is shown to be almost globally finite time stable using a Lyapunov analysis in the absence of measurement errors. A generalized Wahba's cost function, designed to be a Morse function on SO(3), is used to derive the nonlinear estimation scheme and show its stability. The proposed scheme is discretized as a geometric variational integrator for digital implementation. The stability and convergence of the estimation scheme are shown analytically, and validated through numerical simulations.     

Attitude Tracking With Adaptive Rejection of Rate Gyro Disturbances

The classical attitude control problem for a rigid body is revisited under the assumption that measurements of the angular rates obtained by means of rate gyros are corrupted by harmonic disturbances, a setup of importance in several aerospace applications. This note extends previous methods developed to compensate bias in angular rate measurements by accounting for a more general class of disturbances, and by allowing uncertainty in the inertial parameters. By resorting to adaptive observers designed on the basis of the internal model principle, it is shown how converging estimates of the angular velocity can be used effectively in a passivity-based controller yielding global convergence within the chosen parametrization of the group of rotations. Since a persistence of excitation condition is not required for the convergence of the state estimates, only an upper bound on the number of distinct harmonic components of the disturbance is needed for the applicability of the method.     

Bounded attitude control of rigid bodies: Real-time experimentation to a quadrotor mini-helicopter

A quaternion-based feedback is developed for the attitude stabilization of rigid bodies. The control design takes into account a priori input bounds and is based on nested saturation approach. It results in a very simple controller suitable for an embedded use with low computational resources available. The proposed method is generic not restricted to symmetric rigid bodies and does not require the knowledge of the inertia matrix of the body. The control law can be tuned to force closed-loop trajectories to enter in some a priori fixed neighborhood of the origin in a finite time and remain thereafter. The global stability is guaranteed in the case where angular velocity sensors have limited measurement range. The control law is experimentally applied to the attitude stabilization of a quadrotor mini-helicopter.     

Globally exponentially stable attitude observer with Earth velocity estimation

This paper presents a novel observer for attitude estimation based on a triad of high‐grade rate gyros aided by a body‐fixed vector measurement of a constant inertial vector, departing from the majority of solutions that consider at least two of these vectors. A cascade approach is proposed, where the first block estimates a vector that is related to the angular velocity of the Earth and a second block estimates the attitude. While the topological characteristics are relaxed in the attitude observer so that global exponential stability is achieved, an additional stage is also devised that yields estimates directly on the special orthogonal group, preserving global convergence of the estimation error. Simulation results with realistic sensor noise were performed, including extensive Monte Carlo runs. These results illustrate the convergence of the proposed solution, as well as the achievable performance and robustness to sensor noise.     

Attitude control without angular velocity measurement: a passivityapproach

It is well known that the linear feedback of the quaternion of the attitude error and the angular velocity globally stabilizes the attitude of a rigid body. In this note, we show that the angular velocity feedback can be replaced by a nonlinear filter of the quaternion, thus removing the need for direct angular velocity measurement. In contrast to other approaches, this design exploits the inherent passivity of the system; a model-based observer reconstructing the velocity is not needed. An application of the proposed scheme is illustrated for the robot control problem. Simulation results are included to illustrate the theoretical results     

Estimating the angular velocity of a rigid body moving in the plane from tangential and centripetal acceleration measurements

Two methods are available for the estimation of the angular velocity of a rigid body from point-acceleration measurements: (i) the time-integration of the angular acceleration and (ii) the square-rooting of the centripetal acceleration. The inaccuracy of the first method is due mainly to the accumulation of the error on the angular acceleration throughout the time-integration process, which does not prevent that it be used successfully in crash tests with dummies, since these experiments never last more than one second. On the other hand, the error resulting from the second method is stable through time, but becomes inaccurate whenever the rigid body angular velocity approaches zero, which occurs in many applications. In order to take advantage of the complementarity of these two methods, a fusion of their estimates is proposed. To this end, the accelerometer measurements are modeled as exact signals contaminated with bias errors and Gaussian white noise. The relations between the variables at stake are written in the form of a nonlinear state-space system in which the angular velocity and the angular acceleration are state variables. Consequently, a minimum-variance-error estimate of the state vector is obtained by means of extended Kalman filtering. The performance of the proposed estimation method is assessed by means of simulation. Apparently, the resulting estimation method is more robust than the existing accelerometer-only methods and competitive with gyroscope measurements. Moreover, it allows the identification and the compensation of any bias error in the accelerometer measurements, which is a significant advantage over gyroscopes.     

Finite‐time angular velocity observers for rigid‐body attitude tracking with bounded inputs

The attitude tracking of a rigid body without angular velocity measurements is addressed. A continuous angular velocity observer with fractional power functions is proposed to estimate the angular velocity via quaternion attitude information. The fractional power gains can be properly tuned according to a homogeneous method such that the estimation error system is uniformly almost globally finite‐time stable, irrespective of control inputs. To achieve output feedback attitude tracking control, a quaternion‐based nonlinear proportional‐derivative controller using full‐state feedback is designed first, yielding uniformly almost globally finite‐time stable of the attitude tracking system as well as bounded control torques a priori. It is then shown that the certainty equivalent combination of the observer and nonlinear proportional‐derivative controller ensures finite‐time convergence of the attitude tracking error for almost all initial conditions. The proposed methods not only avoid high‐gain injection, as opposed to the semi‐global results, but also overcome the unwinding problem associated with some quaternion‐based observers and/or controllers. Numerical simulations are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Calculation and correction of attitude parameters without measuring angular velocity

The conventional methods of estimating the parameters of relative attitude of two coordinate trihedrons, a movable trihedron and an immovable one, using representation of vector quantities in projections on the axes of both trihedrons on a finite time interval provide for application of angular velocity of the movable trihedron. This angular velocity is found either by direct measurement or by integration of dynamic equations of angular motion of the solid body correlated with this trihedron. Both ways of calculation of angular velocity have drawbacks. The approach to processing vector information presented below is intended for estimation of the attitude parameters without using any information about the angular velocity of relative motion of the trihedrons. Two problems of determination of attitude of a low-orbit space vehicle are considered as applications.     

Ellipsoidal State Estimates of Linear Dynamic Systems: Their Limiting Behavior

In guaranteed estimation of the states of dynamic systems under deterministic bounded disturbances, use of made of outer ellipsoidal estimates that are optimal relative to the volume and sum of squares of the semiaxes of the ellipsoid. The boundedness and convergence of a sequence of such ellipsoids for stable discrete systems are investigated. The asymptotic behavior of these estimates mostly depends on the minimality criterion chosen for the ellipsoid dimension.     

基于四元数的航天器姿态非线性控制器

针对由四元数描述的航天器姿态控制系统进行了非线性反馈控制器设计.首先,得到一类含角速度测量的反馈控制律.该控制律不仅可以保证闭环系统是全局渐近稳定的,而且保证了2个期望的平衡位置都是稳定的.然后,利用基于四元数的滤波器取代角速度测量,得到一类无需角速度测量的反馈控制律.该控制律同样保证了闭环系统的全局渐近稳定性和2个稳定的期望平衡位置.值得注意的是,2个稳定的期望平衡位置,将促使由任意初始姿态出发的轨迹都就近收敛至任意期望平衡位置.最后,数值仿真展示了所得反馈控制律的优势.     

A coupled nonlinear spacecraft attitude controller and observer with an unknown constant gyro bias and gyro noise

We propose a new algorithm for estimating constant biases in gyro measurements of angular velocity, and demonstrate that the resulting estimates converge to the true bias values exponentially fast. The new observer is then combined with a nonlinear attitude tracking control strategy in a certainty equivalence fashion, and the combination shown via Lyapunov analysis to produce globally stable closed-loop dynamics, with asymptotically perfect tracking of any commanded attitude sequence. The analysis is then extended to consider the effects of stochastic measurement noise in the gyro in addition to the bias. A simulation is given for a rigid spacecraft tracking a specified, time-varying attitude sequence to illustrate the theoretical claims.     

角速度约束下的刚体飞行器鲁棒有限时间姿态镇定

针对角速度状态受限条件下的刚体飞行器姿态镇定控制问题,提出一种基于扰动观测器的时变状态增益有限时间姿态控制方法.针对基于修正型罗德里格斯参数(MRPs)描述的刚体飞行器姿态控制模型,首先,利用齐次性理论并充分考虑到系统的模型结构特点,设计一种带有角速度约束项的有限时间姿态控制器,使得系统有限时间镇定;其次,在初始状态满足受限条件的情况下,角速度在任意时刻都可以被约束在期望的范围内;然后,针对存在外部干扰的姿态环动力学系统,提出一种带扰动估计补偿的复合有限时间姿态镇定控制器;最后,通过与其他两种控制方法的仿真比较,验证了所提出控制方案的有效性和优越性.     

Drift-free attitude estimation for accelerated rigid bodies

In this paper we study the attitude estimation problem for an accelerated rigid body using gyros and accelerometers. The application in mind is that of a walking robot and particular attention is paid to the large and abrupt changes in accelerations that can be expected in such an environment. We propose a state estimation algorithm that fuses data from rate gyros and accelerometers to give long-term drift free attitude estimates. The algorithm does not use any local parameterization of the rigid body kinematics and can thus be used for a rigid body performing any kind of rotations. The algorithm is a combination of two non-standard, but in a sense linear, Kalman filters between which a trigger based switching takes place. The kinematics representation used makes it possible to construct a linear algorithm that can be shown to give convergent estimates for this nonlinear problem. The state estimator is evaluated in simulations demonstrating how the estimates are long-term stable even in the presence of gyro drift.     

Rigid body attitude tracking without angular velocity feedback

In this paper, we revisit the classical problem of attitude tracking for a rigid body. The interesting difference in the formulation is the assumption that only attitude measurements are available. We proceed to construct globally stabilizing control laws in terms of a minimal set of three-dimensional kinematic parameters that enable the rigid body to track any specified trajectory without requiring angular velocity measurements. The results presented here complement and extend some recent developments available for the nonminimal case of Euler parameters (quaternions).     

Output feedback control for attitude tracking

In this paper the problem of attitude tracking control for a rigid spacecraft is addressed. It is assumed that only attitude measurements are available, and thus spacecraft's angular velocity has to be properly estimated. Two alternative schemes are proposed in which the unit quaternion is adopted to represent the orientation. In the first scheme, a second-order model-based observer is adopted to estimate the angular velocity used in the control law. In the second scheme, an estimate of the angular velocity error is obtained through a lead filter. Sufficient conditions ensuring local exponential stability of the two controllers are derived via Lyapunov analysis.     

Velocity‐free attitude stabilization with inertial vector measurements

This paper deals with the attitude stabilization problem of a rigid body, where neither the angular velocity nor the attitude is used in the feedback; only body‐referenced vector measurements are needed. The proposed control scheme is based on an angular velocity observer‐like system relying solely on vector measurements. The proposed controller ensures almost global asymptotic stability and provides some interesting performance properties through an appropriate tuning of the control gains. The performance and effectiveness of the proposed control scheme are illustrated via simulation results where the control gains are adjusted using a nonlinear optimization. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A globally convergent angular velocity observer for rigid bodymotion

The problem of obtaining the angular velocity of a rigid body from orientation and torque measurements only, without noisy numerical differentiation, is considered. A novel angular velocity/angular momentum observer for rigid body motion is presented. Using Euler quaternions and a mechanical energy function approach, it is shown that the observer estimates converge globally and that the convergence is eventually exponential. It is hoped that a mechanical energy function approach to rigid body control can be combined with the observer presented to lead to a globally stable, nonlinear, observer-based, rigid-body controller in which the observer and controller errors can be separated, in much the same way as one can separate controller and observer poles in the output feedback controllers of linear system theory