A novel method for aircraft attitude estimation using magnetic field sensors and dynamic modeling

A novel method for computing the attitude (roll, pitch, and heading) of a typical light aircraft has been devised, based on an electronic magnetic compass system developed by the authors. The compass uses a set of three magnetic sensors, which give a stable and accurate three-axis measurement of the Earth's magnetic field vector H. This measurement has been used to solve algebraically for the magnetic heading given roll and pitch attitude measurements from some external source such as a mechanical artificial horizon (AH) gyroscope. A major research aim has been to make the compass independent of external roll and pitch measurements. It has been found that, given the pitch, the roll and heading angles can be estimated in actual flight via an innovative algorithm which minimizes the quadratic norm error between H (measured) and H/spl circ/ computed using the estimated roll and heading.