The performance of any inertially stabilized platform (ISP) is strongly related to the bandwidth and accuracy of the angular velocity signals. This paper discusses the development of an optimal state estimator for sensing inertial velocity using low-cost micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) sensors. A low-bandwidth gyroscope is used alone with two low-performance accelerometers to obtain the estimation. The gyroscope has its own limited dynamics and mainly contributes to the low-frequency components of the estimation. The accelerometers have inherent biases and mainly contribute to the high-frequency components of the estimation. Extensive experimental results show that the state estimator can achieve high-performance signals over a wide range of velocities without drifts in both the t- and s-domains. Furthermore, with applications in miniature inertially stabilized platforms, the control characteristic presents a significantly improvement over the existing methods. The method can be also applied to robotics, attitude estimation, and friction compensation.
Accurate parameter identification is essential when designing controllers for inertially stabilized platforms (lSPs). But traditional identification methods suffer from observation measurement noise and operating restrictions of ISPs. To address this issue, a novel identification method based on current command design and multilevel coordinate search (MCS) algorithm without any higher order measurement differentiations was proposed. The designed current commands were adopted to obtain parameter decoupled models with the platform operating under allowable conditions. MCS algorithm was employed to estimate the parameters based on parameter decoupled models. A comparison experiment between the proposed method and non-linear least square method was carried out and most of the relative errors of identified parameters obtained by the proposed method were below 10%. Simulation and experiment based on identified parameters were conducted. A velocity control structure was also developed with disturbance observer (DOB) for application in disturbance compensation control system of an ISR Experimental results show that the control scheme based on the identified parameters with DOB has the best disturbance rejection performance. It reduces the peak to peak value (PPV) of velocity error integral to 0.8 mrad which is much smaller than the value (10 mrad) obtained by the single velocity controller without DOB. Compared with the control scheme based on sweep model with DOB compensation, the proposed control scheme improves the PPV of velocity error integral by 1.625 times.