An attitude estimation system for amphibious spherical robots

As one of the most effective tools for exploring the ocean, automatic underwater vehicles have attracted a lot of attentions for years. But some key problems have not been solved properly. It is especially difficult to design underwater vehicles in small size. In this paper, three inertial sensors were adopted to fabricate an attitude estimation system, which provided posture information for our amphibious spherical robot to realize motion control and autonomous navigation. The pitch, roll and heading angel were acquired from current robot attitude matrix, which was calculated from the quaternion algorithm. And the attitude was corrected by the fusion of accelerometer and magnetic sensor. Experimental results verified the validation and precision of the robotic attitude estimation system. It has manifested that the system is effective to realize the robot control and navigation.