Combined Quaternion-Based Error State Kalman Filtering and Smooth Variable Structure Filtering for Robust Attitude Estimation

This paper presents a novel robust quaternion-based error state Kalman filter (ESKF) for coping with modeling uncertainty in inertial measurement unit (IMU)-based attitude estimation. The smooth variable structure filter (SVSF) has recently been proposed and proven to be robust to modeling uncertainty. In an effort to combine the accuracy of an ESKF with the robustness of the SVSF, the ESKF and SVSF algorithms have been merged to create the …