Constructive Equivariant Observer Design for Inertial Velocity-Aided Attitude

Abstract: Inertial Velocity-Aided Attitude (VAA) is an important problem in the control of Remotely Piloted Aerial Systems (RPAS), and involves estimating the velocity and attitude of a vehicle using gyroscope, accelerometer, and inertial-frame velocity (e.g. GPS velocity) measurements. Existing solutions tend to be complex and provide limited stability guarantees, relying on either high gain designs or assuming constant acceleration of the vehicle. This paper proposes a novel observer for inertial VAA that exploits Lie group symmetries of the system dynamics, and shows that the observer is synchronous with the system trajectories. This is achieved by adding a virtual state of only three dimensions, in contrast to the larger virtual states typically used in the literature. The error dynamics of the observer are shown to be almost globally asymptotically and locally exponentially stable. Finally, the observer is verified in simulation, where it is shown that the estimation error converges to zero even with an extremely poor initial condition.