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A two-step strategy to fuse the height measurements of quadrotors: theoretical analysis and experimental verifications

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Abstract

For low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles, it is practically important to estimate flight height using the measurements from low-cost accelerometer and barometer sensors. In this paper, we propose a simple two-step strategy to fuse the measurements from the two sensors. In the first step, two different filters, moving average filter and Kalman filter, are adopted to pre-process the measurements from accelerometer and barometer, respectively. In the second step, a properly designed complementary filter is employed for high-precision height estimation. Several experimental comparison results on a small-size quadrotor demonstrate the effectiveness of the strategy. The strategy is further combined with a simple height controller to yield a height feedback-control scheme. The closed-loop experimental results show that 8-cm and 20-cm control accuracies are achieved for 5-m- and 10-m-height tracking tasks, respectively.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61773095) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. ZYGX2016J161) at UESTC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. General Aviation Academy, Chengdu Aeronautic Polytechnic, Chengdu, China

    Qiang Wang

  2. School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), Chengdu, China

    Youzhi Yang, Boxian Lin & Bo Zhu

  3. School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Sun Yat-Sen University (SYSU), Guangzhou, China

    Bo Zhu

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  1. Qiang Wang
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  2. Youzhi Yang
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  3. Boxian Lin
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  4. Bo Zhu
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Correspondence to Bo Zhu.

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Wang, Q., Yang, Y., Lin, B. et al. A two-step strategy to fuse the height measurements of quadrotors: theoretical analysis and experimental verifications. AS 2, 41–49 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42401-018-0019-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42401-018-0019-7

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