Design and validation of an attitude and heading reference system for an aerial robot prototype

In this paper we consider the design and the exper- imental validation of an attitude and heading reference system for a miniature aerial robot prototype based on measurements obtained from a low cost off-the-shelf inertial measurement unit. Different estimation algorithms to process the raw inertial data are implemented and validated in real indoor flight tests by employing, as a reference, the accurate attitude estimation obtained from a vision based motion tracking system. The proposed experiments allow to accurately evaluate the perfor- mance of the different estimation algorithms and the effects of disturbances, such as vehicle accelerations, vibrations and non ideal magnetic fields, in a typical scenario of application for the considered unmanned vehicle prototype.