I have been working on an improved altitude estimator for a while here but have been having issues with implementation.

The theory works fine but as seen above in the FFT of the accelerometer data,…

The barometric sensor alone in most cases provides noisy and drift prone measurements. I have been trying to come up with a simple way to implement a fixed gain filter to utilize the acceleration measurements from the accelerometers to help clean up the noise and also add a sanity check via sensor fusion.…

I posted this earlier but did some tweaking on it to compare the Extended Kalman to my Fixed Gain Observer filters. I haven’t finished the FGO position filter but am really starting to lean more on EKF because the performance really is significantly better.…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cipTQAUM-v4

Note** these are 100meter orbits with really strong winds to provide a…

I wrote down a napkin sketch of an altitude filter a while back and finally got around to testing it in the simulator. I designed it to improve the sensed altitude of the ardupilot. It is based on a fixed gain observer model and shows very promising results. The idea is to use the "lagless" airspeed sensor to give you a less noisy lagless altitude estimate. Enjoy!

K_alt = -0.01;

avg_aoa = 0.52*(pi/180); //alpha =…