Real-time Magnetometer Disturbance Estimation via Online Nonlinear Programming

Abstract: Magnetometer is a significant sensor for integrated navigation. However, it suffers from many kinds of unknown dynamic magnetic disturbances. We study the problem of online estimating such disturbances via a nonlinear optimization aided by intermediate quaternion estimation from inertial fusion. The proposed optimization is constrained by geographical distribution of magnetic field forming a constrained nonlinear programming. The uniqueness of the solution has been verified mathematically and we design an interior-point-based solver for efficient computation on embedded chips. It is claimed that the designed scheme mainly outperforms in dealing with the challenging bias estimation problem under static motion as previous representatives can hardly achieve. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme on high accuracy, fast response and low computational load.