Lightweight Extended Kalman Filter for MARG Sensors Attitude Estimation

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Low-power consumption of orientation estimation using low-cost inertial sensors are crucial for all the applications which are resource constrained critically. This paper presents a novel Lightweight quaternion-based Extended Kalman Filter (LEKF) for orientation estimation for magnetic, angular rate and gravity (MARG) sensors. In this filter, with employing the quaternion kinematic equation as the process model, we derived a simplified measurement model to create the lightweight system model for Kalman filtering, where the measurement model works efficiently, and the involved computation of measurement model is reduced. It’s later proved that the proposed filter saves time consumption. Further, observations of the accelerometer and the magnetometer are dealt with the proposed nonlinear measurement model, the good performance should be guaranteed in theory. For the experiments, a commercial sensor for data collection, and an optical system to provide reference measurements of orientation, namely Vicon, are utilized to investigate the performance of the proposed filter. Evaluation for different application scenarios are considered, which primarily includes human motion capture and the drone application. Results indicate that the proposed filter performs well for both applications, and is proved to have a good anti-vibration ability. What’s more, the comparison experiment shows that the proposed filter provides good performance, as same as the basic UKF, but it consumes the least computing time among the compared methods.