Fusion of diverse performance inertial sensors for improved attitude estimation within a stabilisation platform for electro-optic systems

Within line of sight pointing and stabilisation of EO (Electro-optic) systems operating under motion disturbances it is desirable to measure the inertial orientation of different parts of the system, not just the line of sight - this would allow additional information to be added to the control loop. To implement this a framework to fuse the multiple inertial sensors of the EO system is considered, with an example implemented. The fusion of higher performance sensors located at the line of sight is implemented within the proposed framework, to improve the performance of the estimate at the location of the lower performance sensor. The fusion framework makes use of cascaded Multiplicative Extended Kalman Filter that estimate the multiplicative error of the quaternion orientation estimate.