Unmanned aerial vehicle speed estimation via nonlinear adaptive observers

Khadidja Benzemrane (1) , Giovanni L. Santosuosso (2) , Gilney Damm (2)

1 IBISC - Informatique, Biologie Intégrative et Systèmes Complexes
2 Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettronica [Roma]

In this paper the problem of the speed estimation of an unmanned aerial vehicle is addressed, when acceleration, the angles and the angular speeds are available for measurement. We focus our analysis on a prototype drone - a 4 rotors helicopter robot- which is not equipped with GPS related devices and relies on the inertial measurement unit (IMU) only. A global exponential solution to this open problem is provided in the framework of adaptive observation theory when exact measurements are available. A modified estimator is presented to enhance robustness in velocity estimation in the realistic case of noisy acceleration measurements.

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]; Système multi-agents [cs.MA]; Automatique; Mécanique [physics.med-ph]; Mécanique des structures [physics.class-ph]; Automatique / Robotique

Khadidja Benzemrane, Giovanni L. Santosuosso, Gilney Damm. Unmanned aerial vehicle speed estimation via nonlinear adaptive observers. 26th American Control Conference (ACC 2007), Jul 2007, New York, United States. ⟨10.1109/ACC.2007.4282827⟩. ⟨hal-00342774⟩