Isotropic Accelerometer Strapdowns and Related Algorithms for Rigid Body Pose and Twist Estimation

Abstract

A novel design of accelerometer strapdown, intended for the estimation of the rigidbody acceleration and velocity fields, is proposed here. The authors introduce the concept of isotropicpolyhedral layout of simplicial biaxial accelerometers (SBA), in which one SBA is rigidly attached at the centroid of each face of the polyhedron. By virtue of both the geometric isotropy of the layout and the structural planar isotropy of the SBA, the point tangential relative acceleration is decoupled from its centripetal counterpart, which is filtered out, along with the angular velocity. The outcome is that the rigidbody angular acceleration can be estimated independent of the angular velocity, thereby overcoming a hurdle that mars the estimation process in current accelerometer strapdowns. An estimation algorithm, based on the extended Kalman filter, is included. Simulation results show an excellent performance of the proposed strapdowns in estimating the acceleration and velocity fields of a moving object along with its pose.