Attitude estimation for small helicopter using extended kalman filter

Accurate attitude estimation is vital for VTOL UAV (vertical take-off and landing unmanned aerial vehicle) systems, including small helicopter. The main focus of present research is to compile the principles of navigation and Kalman filtering, and their application and implementation towards UAV systems. This paper introduces a method based on EKF (Extended Kalman filter) to estimate small helicopter¿s attitude with little drift and low noise, which uses strapdown attitude as state update, and treats the attitude estimated by the bi-vector method as measurement update. By evaluating the EKF method with small helicopter´s real ground and flight sensor data, it shows good performance: stable, small error. So it is suitable for small helicopter attitude estimation application.