Ground Test and Performance Evaluation of Miniaturized AHRS for Small-Scale UAV

A small UAVs(Unmaned Aerial Vehicles) have limited by the payload capacity which requires miniaturization of a navigation system. In this paper, the performance of the lightweight and small sized AHRS(Attitude Heading Reference System), which is self-developed, is evaluated at low acceleration environment. The designed AHRS adopts the commercial low-cost MEMS sensors. A quaternion-based attitude calculation method, which eliminates singularity with relatively simple algebra, is used. In an attitude correction algorithm, the Kalman filter is used with accelerometers and magnetometers combined. The fabricated AHRS is also evaluated with reference to a COTS(Commercial Off-The-Shelf) AHRS which reports a number of successful applications to a small UAVs. The test results show that the measurements from the fabricated AHRS provide proper attitude output data with acceptable amount of differences(horizontal axis 0.5, vertical axis 1.5) in test environment.