State Estimation Using Single Body-Frame Bearing Measurements

This paper addresses the problem of simultaneous estimation of the position, linear velocity and orientation of a rigid body using single bearing measurements. We introduce a Riccati observer-based estimator that fuses measurements from a 3-axis accelerometer, a 3-axis gyroscope, a single body-frame vector observation (e.g., magnetometer), and a single bearing-to-landmark measurement to obtain the full vehicle’s state (position, velocity, orientation). The proposed observer guarantees global exponential convergence under some persistency of excitation (PE) condition on the vehicle’s motion. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.