Pitch and roll angle estimation using partial DCM model approach for a high performance aircraft

This paper proposes an approach to estimate a high performance aircraft's pitch and roll attitudes using three axis gyro, two axis accelerometer and airdata sensors. The formulation used is that of partial Direction Cosine Matrix (DCM) estimation and is an improvement over existing formulations which depend on three axis acceleration data, GPS velocities and magnetometer signals. The modeling proposed in this paper is casted in the Extended Kalman Filtering frame work by combining the available inertial signals with the calibrated airdata signals. Results using the flight test data of high performance aircraft are presented.