Implementation of high-gain observer on low-cost fused IR-OS sensor embedded in UAV system

This paper presents discrete time implementation of a high gain observer (HGO) and extended term to estimate the state velocity and acceleration from the position measured by a low-cost sensor installed on-board the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Owing to the low-cost sensor, the signal produced from fused IR–OS is noisy and therefore, additional filters are used to remove the noise. This study proposes an alternative to this standard and tedious procedure using HGO. The discrete time implementation of HGO and its extended term is presented and ground tests are conducted to verify the algorithm by inducing a dynamic motion on the UAV platform embedded with the fusion IR-OS onboard. A comparison study is conducted using standard numerical differentiation and ground truth measurement by OptiTrack. The results show that EHGO can produce a velocity signal with the same quality as that of differentiated signal from fused IR-OS using Kalman filter. The novelty of HGO lies in its simplicity and its minimal tuning of parameters. (paper)