Absolute Attitude Estimation of Rigid Body on Moving Platform Using Only Two Gyroscopes and Relative Measurements

Many outdoor activities, such as bicycling, driving, and riding segways can be modeled as rigid bodies on a moving platform. In this study, an attitude estimation scheme is established for the rigid body-moving platform system by using two gyroscopes and relative measurements between the rigid body and the platform. The proposed scheme estimates the drift-free attitudes of the rigid body and the partial drift-free absolute attitudes of the platform without using any global information or reference. The kinematic model plays an important role to obtain the drift-free estimation of the absolute attitude angles. To illustrate this, the estimation scheme is compared to another design with an alternative kinematic model. The estimation result differences between the two designs are analyzed through observability and posterior Cramer-Rao bound calculations. Extensive experiments are also conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed attitude estimation scheme with application to bicycle riding examples.