A distributed quaternion Kalman filter with applications to fly-by-wire systems

The introduction of automated flight control and management systems have made possible aircraft designs that sacrifice aerodynamic stability in order to incorporate stealth technology into their shape, operate more efficiently, and are highly manoeuvrable. Therefore, modern flight management systems are reliant on multiple redundant sensors to monitor and control the rotations of the aircraft. To this end, a novel distributed quaternion Kalman filtering algorithm is developed for tracking the rotation and orientation of an aircraft in the three-dimensional space. The algorithm is developed so as to distribute computation among the sensors in a manner that forces them to consent to a unique solution while being robust to sensor and link failure, a desirable characteristic for flight management systems. In addition, the underlying quaternion-valued state space model allows to avoid problems associated with gimbal lock. The performance of the developed algorithm is verified through simulations.