Multimodal Sensor Fusion for Attitude Control of Micromechanical Flying Insects: a Geometric Approach

In this paper, we study sensor fusion for the attitude stabilization of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), in particular mechanical flying insects. First, following a geometric approach, a dynamic observer is proposed which estimates attitude based on kinematic data available from different and redundant bioinspired sensors such as halteres, ocelli, gravitometers, magnetic compass and light polarization compass. In particular, the traditional structure of complementary filters, suitable for multiple sensor fusion, is specialized to the Lie group of rigid body rotations SO(3) by means of an intrinsic notion of state error. A natural Lyapunov function is then defined to prove almostglobal asymptotic stability of the proposed observer. Second, stability of traditional passivity-based attitude controllers is proved also in the case when the output of the proposed dynamic observer is used as state feedback. Finally, simulations are used to demonstrate greater robustness to disturbances of dynamic attitude estimation feedback as compared with static output feedback. keywords: sensor fusion, ocelli, halteres, gravitometer, polarization sensor, attitude control, SO(3) Lie group