Attitude estimation for an all-rotating monocopter through attitude decomposition and MARG Sensor fusion

A monocopter is a biology-inspired aircraft based on samara. Due to the constant high spin during flight, attitude estimation is highly challenging. The difficulty of attitude estimation is extracting the effective gravity acceleration information from the large centripetal acceleration interference. Based on the characteristics of monocopters, our study proposes a method to accomplish monocopter attitude estimation through onboard sensor fusion. Our method decomposes the body attitude angles into two-disc attitude angles and three relative attitude angles. Through five steps (a priori body attitude estimation, relative attitude calculation, gravity acceleration information extraction, body attitude estimation through data fusion, and disc attitude estimation), a low-cost attitude determination method relying only on magnetic, angular rate, and gravity sensors is achieved. Finally, the performance of our proposed attitude estimation method is demonstrated through tests on a rotational platform and three degrees of freedom virtual flight testing of a monocopter. The test results show that the attitude estimation method has high precision and the ability for practical applications.