Observer based Rigid Body Attitude Tracking Using Vector Measurements Directly

This paper considers the construction of attitude tracking algorithms of a rigid body in the absence of angular velocity measurements, based on the typical observer-controller framework. Compared with the classical attitude tracking algorithms, the proposed method utilizes the inertial vectors measurements directly in an explicit form, without any reconstruction of the attitude vectors. To analyze the stability of the observer-controller, a strict Lyapunov-like function is adopted for the controller part. Simulations are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.