Journal Article

Double-complementary filter attitude estimator for decoupling magnetometer interference on pitch and roll

Wang, Chenyang, Lu, Yong, He, Qianen

2025

Overview

Wearable Inertial Measurement Units (WIMU) based on Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) inertial sensors and magnetometers offer advantages such as low cost and user-friendly integration, making it a promising tool for lower-limb human motion analysis. Achieving accurate attitude estimation through effective filtering to fuse the aforementioned heterogeneous sensor data is crucial. However, magnetometer measurements affect the determination of yaw and influence the estimation of pitch and roll angles; magnetic interference can degrade accuracy in situations requiring high-precision pitch and roll estimation. This paper proposes a Double-Complementary Filter (DCF) attitude estimator. It adopts a two-layer filter architecture. In the first layer, the vector cross-product processes the accelerometer output to generate a correction vector, which, in conjunction with gyroscope measurements, serves as the input to the filter. In the second-layer filter, the magnetometer output is decoupled from the roll and pitch estimates, ensuring that only the yaw correction vector is retained. The final attitude is obtained by fusing the outputs of both layers of filters. To verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we conducted comparative experiments using the self-developed WIMU and representative algorithms. The results show that the proposed algorithm effectively resolves the magnetic field coupling issue without affecting overall accuracy.

• Publisher: IOP Publishing
• Subject: Accelerometers / Algorithms / Attitude (inclination) / Decoupling / Effectiveness / Human motion / Inertial platforms / Inertial sensing devices / Magnetometers / Microelectromechanical systems / Pitch (inclination) / Rolling motion / Yaw