The Attitude Measurement of Horizontal Directional Drilling Equipment Based on Quaternion and Extended Kalman Filtering Method

Abstract

For the attitude measurement of drilling tool in horizontal directional drilling, a new method for attitude measurement system based on quaternion and extended Kalman filter (EKF) is presented. The attitude measurement system consists of three-axis accelerometer and three-axis gyroscope. Based on the data information obtained by the inertial sensor, the attitude angle of the drilling tool can be calculated. To limit the errors of angle measurement, this research combines the errors of the sensors and the measurement noise and uses EKF method to obtain three angles. Three angles consist of pitch angle, roll angle, drilling angle. The proposed method was tested by two experiments. Results showed that this method could limit the error of drilling tool attitude measurement and reduce the impact of environmental noise on the measurement.