A Global Interconnected Observer for Attitude and Gyro Bias Estimation with Vector Measurements

This paper proposes a novel interconnected observer to get good estimates of attitude and gyro bias from high-noise vector measurements. The observer is derived based on the theory of nonlinear and linear cascade systems, and its error dynamics have the properties of global exponential stability and robustness to bounded noise. These properties ensure the convergence and boundedness of the attitude and gyro bias estimation errors. To obtain higher estimation accuracy, an approach to calculate time-varying gains for the proposed auxiliary observer is designed under the premise of considering noise terms in the rate gyro and vector sensors. The simulation results show that when the vector sensors’ outputs contain high-level noise, the proposed observer with time-varying gains yields better performance in both the transient and steady-state phases.