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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and radar technology have benefitted from breakthroughs in recent decades. Both technologies have found applications independently of each other, but together, they also unlock new possibilities, especially for remote sensing applications. One of the key factors for a remote sensing system is the estimation of the flight attitude. Despite the advancements, accurate attitude estimation remains a significant challenge, particularly due to the limitations of a conventional Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). Because these sensors may suffer from issues such as drifting, additional effort is required to obtain a stable attitude. Against that background, this study introduces a novel methodology for making an attitude estimation using radar data. Herein, we present a drone measurement system and detail its calculation process. We also demonstrate our results using three flight scenarios and outline the limitations of the approach. The results show that the roll and pitch angles can be calculated using the radar data, and we conclude that the findings of this research will help to improve the flight attitude estimation of remote sensing flights with a radar sensor.

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Attitude determination based on a micro-electro-mechanical system inertial measurement unit (MEMS-IMU) has attracted extensive attention. The non-gravitational components of the MEMS-IMU have a significant effect on the accuracy of attitude estimation. To improve the attitude estimation of low-dynamic vehicles under uneven soil conditions or vibrations, a robust Kalman filter (RKF) was developed and tested in this paper, where the noise covariance was adaptively changed to compensate for the external acceleration of the vehicle. The state model for MEMS-IMU attitude estimation was initially constructed using a simplified direction cosine matrix. Subsequently, the variance of unmodeled external acceleration was estimated online based on filtering innovations of different window lengths, where the acceleration disturbance was addressed by tradeoffs in time-delay and prescribed computation cost. The effectiveness of the RKF was validated through experiments using a three-axis turntable, an automatic vehicle, and a tractor tillage test. The turntable experiment demonstrated that the angle result of the RKF was 0.051° in terms of root mean square error (RMSE), showing improvements of 65.5% and 29.2% over a conventional KF and MTi-300, respectively. The dynamic attitude estimation of the automatic vehicle showed that the RKF achieves smoother pitch angles than the KF when the vehicle passes over speed bumps at different speeds; the RMSE of pitch was reduced from 0.875° to 0.460° and presented a similar attitude trend to the MTi-300. The tractor tillage test indicated that the RMSE of plough pitch was improved from 0.493° with the KF to 0.259° with the RKF, an enhancement of approximately 47.5%, illustrating the superiority of the RKF in suppressing the external acceleration disturbances of IMU-based attitude estimation.

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In this paper, the kinematic models of the Strapdown Inertial Navigation System (SINS) and its errors on the SE(3) group in the Earth-Centered Inertial frame (ECI) are established. On the one hand, with the ECI frame being regarded as the reference, based on the joint representation of attitude and velocity on the SE(3) group, the dynamic of the local geographic coordinate system (n-frame) and the body coordinate system (b-frame) evolve on the differentiable manifold, respectively, and the high-order expansion of the Baker-Campbell-Haussdorff equation compensates for the non-commutative motion errors stimulated by strong maneuverability. On the other hand, the kinematics of the left- and right-invariant errors of the n-frame and the b-frame on the SE(3) group are separately derived, where the errors of the b-frame completely depend on inertial sensor errors, while the errors of the n-frame rely on position errors and velocity errors. In this way, the errors brought by the inconsistency of the reference coordinate system are tackled, and a novel attitude error definition is introduced to separate and decouple the factors affecting the dynamic of the n-frame errors and the b-frame errors for better attitude estimation. Through a turntable experiment and a car-mounted field experiment, the effectiveness of the proposed kinematic models in estimating attitude has been verified, with a remarkable improvement in yaw angle accuracy in the case of large initial misalignment angles, and the models developed have better robustness compared to the traditional SE(3) group-based model.

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The utilization of drone technology thrives in diverse domains, including aviation, military operations, and logistics. The pervasive adoption of this technology aims to enhance efficiency while mitigating hazards and expenditures. In complex contexts, the governing parameters of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) require real-time adjustments for flight safety and efficacy. To improve the attitude estimation accuracy, this article introduces a ATT-Bi-LSTM framework for optimizing UAVs through adaptive parameter control, which integrates the state information gleaned from communication signals. The ATT-Bi-LSTM achieves data feature extraction by means of a two-layer Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BI-LSTM) at its inception to enhance the feature. Subsequently, it harnesses the attention mechanism to amplify the LSTM network's output, thereby enabling the optimal control of UAV positioning. During the empirical phase, we employ optical system data for the comparative validation of the model. The outcomes underscore the commendable performance of the proposed framework in this study, particularly with regard to the three pivotal position indicators: yaw, pitch, and roll. In the comparison of indicators such as RMSR and MAE, the proposed model has the lowest error, which provides algorithm support and important reference for future UAV optimization control research.

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This work is focused on developing a self-calibration algorithm for an orientation estimation of cattle movements based on a quaternion Kalman filter. The accelerometer signals in the earth's frame provide more information to confirm that the cow is performing a jump to mount another cow. To obtain the measurements in the earth's frame, we propose a self-calibration method based on a strapdown inertial navigation system (SINS), which does not require intervention by the user once deployed in the field. The self-calibration algorithm uses a quaternion-based Kalman filter to predict the angular orientation with bias correction, and update it based on the measurements of accelerometers and magnetometers. The paper also depicts an alternate update to adjust the inclination using only the accelerometer measurements. We conducted experiments to compare the accuracy of the orientation estimation when the body moves similarly to cow mount movements. The comparison is between the proposed self-calibration algorithm with the IvenSense MPU9250 and Bosch BNO055 and the quaternion attitude estimation provided in the BNO055. The auto-calibrating algorithm presents a mean error of 0.149 rads with a mean consumption of 308.5 mW, and the Bosch algorithm shows an average error of 0.139 rads with a mean consumption of 307.5 mW. When we executed this algorithm in an MPU9250, the average error was 0.077 rads, and the mean consumption was 277.7 mW.

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Robot arm monitoring is often required in intelligent industrial scenarios. A two-stage method for robot arm attitude estimation based on multi-view images is proposed. In the first stage, a super-resolution keypoint detection network (SRKDNet) is proposed. The SRKDNet incorporates a subpixel convolution module in the backbone neural network, which can output high-resolution heatmaps for keypoint detection without significantly increasing the computational resource consumption. Efficient virtual and real sampling and SRKDNet training methods are put forward. The SRKDNet is trained with generated virtual data and fine-tuned with real sample data. This method decreases the time and manpower consumed in collecting data in real scenarios and achieves a better generalization effect on real data. A coarse-to-fine dual-SRKDNet detection mechanism is proposed and verified. Full-view and close-up dual SRKDNets are executed to first detect the keypoints and then refine the results. The keypoint detection accuracy, PCK@0.15, for the real robot arm reaches up to 96.07%. In the second stage, an equation system, involving the camera imaging model, the robot arm kinematic model and keypoints with different confidence values, is established to solve the unknown rotation angles of the joints. The proposed confidence-based keypoint screening scheme makes full use of the information redundancy of multi-view images to ensure attitude estimation accuracy. Experiments on a real UR10 robot arm under three views demonstrate that the average estimation error of the joint angles is 0.53 degrees, which is superior to that achieved with the comparison methods.

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The attitude measurement system based on geomagnetic information offers advantages such as small space requirements, fast response times, excellent resistance to high-overload conditions, and cost-effectiveness. However, during the flight process of a high-mobility guided spinning projectile, calculating attitude based on geomagnetic information often leads to non-unique solutions. To address this challenge, this paper proposes the Adaptive Extended Kalman Filter (AEKF) attitude estimation algorithm, based on geomagnetic vector information. Based on the analysis of the short-term attitude motion characteristics of the projectile, the Kalman state system equation and the nonlinear observation equation are established, along with real-time correction of the yaw angle and adaptive updates of parameters. The effectiveness of the algorithm is verified by simulations and experiments, demonstrating its ability to eliminate the dual solution problem inherent in traditional Single-Epoch algorithms. It notably improves the accuracy of pitch and roll angle estimation while providing precise estimates of attitude angular rates. Furthermore, the algorithm effectively mitigates the impact of magnetic disturbances on attitude determination. The proposed method has many potential applications in attitude measurement and navigation using geomagnetic data.

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In the context of Kalman filters, the predicted error covariance matrix Pk+1 and measurement noise covariance matrix R are used to represent the uncertainty of state variables and measurement noise, respectively. However, in real-world situations, these matrices may vary with time due to measurement faults. To address this issue in CubeSat attitude estimation, an adaptive extended Kalman filter has been proposed that can dynamically estimate the predicted error covariance matrix and measurement noise covariance matrix using an expectation-maximization approach. Simulation experiments have shown that this algorithm outperforms existing methods in terms of attitude estimation accuracy, particularly in sunlit and shadowed phases of the orbit, with the same filtering parameters and initial conditions.

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In this paper, the problem of attitude estimation of a quad-copter system equipped with a multi-rate camera and gyroscope sensors is addressed through extension of a sampling importance re-sampling (SIR) particle filter (PF). Attitude measurement sensors, such as cameras, usually suffer from a slow sampling rate and processing time delay compared to inertial sensors, such as gyroscopes. A discretized attitude kinematics in Euler angles is employed where the gyroscope noisy measurements are considered the model input, leading to a stochastic uncertain system model. Then, a multi-rate delayed PF is proposed so that when no camera measurement is available, the sampling part is performed only. In this case, the delayed camera measurements are used for weight computation and re-sampling. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated through both numerical simulation and experimental work on the DJI Tello quad-copter system. The images captured by the camera are processed using the ORB feature extraction method and the homography method in Python-OpenCV, which is used to calculate the rotation matrix from the Tello's image frames.

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Due to the flight characteristics such as small size, low noise, and high efficiency, studies on flapping wing robots are being actively conducted. In particular, the flapping wing robot is in the spotlight in the field of search and reconnaissance. Most of the research focuses on the development of flapping wing robots rather than autonomous flight. However, because of the unique characteristics of flapping wings, it is essential to consider the development of flapping wing robots and autonomous flight simultaneously. In this article, we describe the development of the flapping wing robot and computationally efficient vision-based obstacle avoidance algorithm suitable for the lightweight robot. We developed a 27 cm and 45 g flapping wing robot named CNUX Mini that features an X-type wing and tailed configuration to attenuate oscillation caused by flapping motion. The flight experiment showed that the robot is capable of stable flight for 1.5 min and changing its direction with a small turn radius in a slow forward flight condition. For the obstacle detection algorithm, the appearance variation cue is used with the optical flow-based algorithm to cope robustly with the motion-blurred and feature-less images obtained during flight. If the obstacle is detected during straight flight, the avoidance maneuver is conducted for a certain period, depending on the state machine logic. The proposed obstacle avoidance algorithm was validated in ground tests using a testbed. The experiment shows that the CNUX Mini performs a suitable evasive maneuver with 90.2% success rate in 50 incoming obstacle situations.

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Star images from star trackers are usually defocused to capture stars over an exposure time for better centroid measurements. While a satellite is maneuvering, the star point on the screen of the camera is affected by the satellite, which results in the degradation of centroid measurement accuracy. Additionally, this could result in a worse star vector outcome. For geostationary satellites, onboard thrusters are used to maintain or change orbit parameters under orbit disturbances. Since there is misalignment in the thruster and torque is generated by an impulsive shape signal from the torque command, it is difficult to generate target torque; in addition, it also impacts the star image because the impulsive torque creates a sudden change in the angular velocity in the satellite dynamics. This makes the noise of the star image non-Gaussian, which may require introducing a method for dealing with non-Gaussian measurement noise. To meet this goal, in this study, an adaptive extended Kalman filter is implemented to predict measurement vectors with predicted states. The GMM (Gaussian mixture model) is connected in this sequence, giving weighting parameters to each Gaussian density and resulting in the better prediction of measurement vectors. Simulation results show that the GMM-EKF exhibits a better performance than the EKF for attitude estimation, with 30% improvement in performance. Therefore, the GMM-EKF could be a more attractive approach for use with geostationary satellites during station-keeping maneuvers.

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Robust and accurate attitude and heading estimation using Micro-Electromechanical System (MEMS) Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) is the most crucial technique that determines the accuracy of various downstream applications, especially pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR), human motion tracking, and Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). However, the accuracy of the Attitude and Heading Reference System (AHRS) is often compromised by the noisy nature of low-cost MEMS-IMUs, dynamic motion-induced large external acceleration, and ubiquitous magnetic disturbance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel data-driven IMU calibration model that employs Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs) to model random errors and disturbance terms, providing denoised sensor data. For sensor fusion, we use an open-loop and decoupled version of the Extended Complementary Filter (ECF) to provide accurate and robust attitude estimation. Our proposed method is systematically evaluated using three public datasets, TUM VI, EuRoC MAV, and OxIOD, with different IMU devices, hardware platforms, motion modes, and environmental conditions; and it outperforms the advanced baseline data-driven methods and complementary filter on two metrics, namely absolute attitude error and absolute yaw error, by more than 23.4% and 23.9%. The generalization experiment results demonstrate the robustness of our model on different devices and using patterns.

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The localization of the center of the star image formed on a sensor array directly affects attitude estimation accuracy. This paper proposes an intuitive self-evolving centroiding algorithm, termed the sieve search algorithm (SSA), which employs the structural properties of the point spread function. This method maps the gray-scale distribution of the star image spot into a matrix. This matrix is further segmented into contiguous sub-matrices, referred to as sieves. Sieves comprise a finite number of pixels. These sieves are evaluated and ranked based on their degree of symmetry and magnitude. Every pixel in the image spot carries the accumulated score of the sieves associated with it, and the centroid is its weighted average. The performance evaluation of this algorithm is carried out using star images of varied brightness, spread radius, noise level, and centroid location. In addition, test cases are designed around particular scenarios, like non-uniform point spread function, stuck-pixel noise, and optical double stars. The proposed algorithm is compared with various long-standing and state-of-the-art centroiding algorithms. The numerical simulation results validated the effectiveness of SSA, which is suitable for small satellites with limited computational resources. The proposed algorithm is found to have precision comparable with that of fitting algorithms. As for computational overhead, the algorithm requires only basic math and simple matrix operations, resulting in a visible decrease in execution time. These attributes make SSA a fair compromise between prevailing gray-scale and fitting algorithms concerning precision, robustness, and processing time.

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Attitude estimation methods provide modern consumer, industrial, and space systems with an estimate of a body orientation based on noisy sensor measurements. The gradient descent algorithm is one of the most recent methods for optimal attitude estimation, whose iterative nature demands adequate adjustment of the algorithm parameters, which is often overlooked in the literature. Here, we present the effects of the step size, the maximum number of iterations, and the initial quaternion, as well as different propagation methods on the quality of the estimation in noiseless and noisy conditions. A novel figure of merit and termination criterion that defines the algorithm's accuracy is proposed. Furthermore, the guidelines for selecting the optimal set of parameters in order to achieve the highest accuracy of the estimate using the fewest iterations are proposed and verified in simulations and experimentally based on the measurements acquired from an in-house developed model of a satellite attitude determination and control system. The proposed attitude estimation method based on the gradient descent algorithm and complementary filter automatically adjusts the number of iterations with the average below 0.5, reducing the demand on the processing power and energy consumption and causing it to be suitable for low-power applications.

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This work provides a 3D hand attitude estimation approach for fixed hand posture based on a CNN and LightGBM for dual-view RGB images to facilitate the application of hand posture teleoperation. First, using dual-view cameras and an IMU sensor, we provide a simple method for building 3D hand posture datasets. This method can quickly acquire dual-view 2D hand image sets and automatically append the appropriate three-axis attitude angle labels. Then, combining ensemble learning, which has strong regression fitting capabilities, with deep learning, which has excellent automatic feature extraction capabilities, we present an integrated hand attitude CNN regression model. This model uses a Bayesian optimization based LightGBM in the ensemble learning algorithm to produce 3D hand attitude regression and two CNNs to extract dual-view hand image features. Finally, a mapping from dual-view 2D images to 3D hand attitude angles is established using a training approach for feature integration, and a comparative experiment is run on the test set. The results of the experiments demonstrate that the suggested method may successfully solve the hand self-occlusion issue and accomplish 3D hand attitude estimation using only two normal RGB cameras.

Asunto(s)

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Aiming at the large-angle maneuver control problem of tracking spacecraft attitude in non-cooperative target rendezvous and proximity tasks, under the condition that the target spacecraft attitude information is unknown and the actuator output has physical limitations, a limited-time autonomous control method is proposed. First, an end-to-end pose estimation network is designed based on adaptive dual-channel feature extraction and dual attention. The information around the target is obtained through the adaptive dual-channel feature extraction module. The addition of spatial attention and channel attention allows the network to learn the target's characteristics more accurately. Secondly, based on the improved adaptive update law, a finite-time saturation controller is designed using the hyperbolic tangent function and the auxiliary system. The hyperbolic tangent function can strictly ensure that the control torque of the control system is bounded. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed autonomous control method can accurately estimate the attitude of the non-cooperative target spacecraft and can maneuver to the target attitude within 20 s under the condition that the actuator's output is physically limited.

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The literature since Apollo contains exhaustive material on attitude filtering, usually treating the problem of two sensors, a combination of state measuring and inertial devices. More recently, it has become popular for a sole attitude determination device to be considered. This is especially the case for a star tracker given its unbiased stellar measurement and recent improvements in optical sensor performance. The state device indirectly estimates the attitude rate using a known dynamic model. In estimation theory, two main attitude filtering approaches are classified, the additive and the multiplicative. Each refers to the nature of the quaternion update in the filter. In this article, these two techniques are implemented for the case of a sole star tracker, using simulated and real night sky image data. Both sets of results are presented and compared with each other, with a baseline established through a basic linear least square estimate. The state approach is more accurate and precise for measuring angular velocity than using the error-based filter. However, no discernible difference is observed between each technique for determining pointing. These results are important not only for sole device attitude determination systems, but also for space situational awareness object localisation, where attitude and rate estimate accuracy are highly important.

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Inertial attitude estimation is a crucial component of many modern systems and applications. Attitude estimation from commercial-grade inertial sensors has been the subject of an abundance of research in recent years due to the proliferation of Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) in mobile devices, such as the smartphone. Traditional methodologies involve probabilistic, iterative-state estimation; however, these approaches do not generalise well over changing motion dynamics and environmental conditions, as they require context-specific parameter tuning. In this work, we explore novel methods for attitude estimation from low-cost inertial sensors using a self-attention-based neural network, the Attformer. This paper proposes to part ways from the traditional cycle of continuous integration algorithms, and formulate it as an optimisation problem. This approach separates itself by leveraging attention operations to learn the complex patterns and dynamics associated with inertial data, allowing for the linear complexity in the dimension of the feature vector to account for these patterns. Additionally, we look at combining traditional state-of-the-art approaches with our self-attention method. These models were evaluated on entirely unseen sequences, over a range of different activities, users and devices, and compared with a recent alternate deep learning approach, the unscented Kalman filter and the iOS CoreMotion API. The inbuilt iOS had a mean angular distance from the true attitude of 117.31∘, the GRU 21.90∘, the UKF 16.38∘, the Attformer 16.28∘ and, finally, the UKF-Attformer had mean angular distance of 10.86∘. We show that this plug-and-play solution outperforms previous approaches and generalises well across different users, devices and activities.

Asunto(s)

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For a small satellite, the processor onboard the attitude determination and control system (ADCS) is required to monitor, communicate, and control all the sensors and actuators. In addition, the processor is required to consistently communicate with the satellite bus. Consequently, the processor is unable to ensure all the sensors and actuators will immediately respond to the data acquisition request, which leads to asynchronous data problems. The extended Kalman filter (EKF) is commonly used in the attitude determination process, but it assumes fully synchronous data. The asynchronous data problem would greatly degrade the attitude determination accuracy by EKF. To minimize the attitude estimation accuracy loss due to asynchronous data while ensuring a reasonable computational complexity for small satellite applications, this paper proposes the simplex-back-propagation Kalman filter (SBPKF). The proposed SBPKF incorporates the time delay, gyro instability, and navigation error into both the measurement and covariance estimation during the Kalman update process. The performance of SBPKF has been compared with EKF, modified adaptive EKF (MAEKF), and moving-covariance Kalman filter (MC-KF). Simulation results show that the attitude estimation error of SBPKF is at least 30% better than EKF and MC-KF. In addition, the SBPKF's computational complexity is 17% lower than MAEKF and 29% lower than MC-KF.

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Aiming at the problem of the weak dynamic performance of the gradient descent method in the attitude and heading reference system, the susceptibility to the interference of accelerometers and magnetometers, and the complex calculation of the nonlinear Kalman Filter method, an extended Kalman filter suitable for a low-cost magnetic, angular rate, and gravity (MARG) sensor system is proposed. The method proposed in this paper is a combination of a two-stage gradient descent algorithm and the extended Kalman filter (GDEKF). First, the accelerometer and magnetometer are used to correct the attitude angle according to the two-stage gradient descent algorithm. The obtained attitude quaternion is combined with the gyroscope measurement value as the observation vector of EKF and the calculated attitude of the gyroscope and the bias of the gyroscope are corrected. The elimination of the bias of the gyroscope can further improve the stability of the attitude observation results. Finally, the MARG sensor system was designed for mathematical model simulation and hardware-in-the-loop simulation to verify the performance of the filter. The results show that compared with the gradient descent method, it has better anti-interference performance and dynamic performance, and better measurement accuracy than the extended Kalman filter.