I've been thinking a lot lately about how cool it would be to implement inertial dead reckoning on ArduCopter for a gps-free loiter mode of sorts. I just wanted to get some discussion going from people who have studied this or have tried implementing it, as I know it is difficult.

To begin with, this is a good read about getting position from accelerometer data: http://perso-etis.ensea.fr/~pierandr/cours/M1_SIC/AN3397.pdf

So my thoughts are that we could integrate the acceleration reading from the accel, subtracting out the acceleration due to tilt angle (we can do this since we have a nice filtered angle reference, or gyro integration). This, once filtered nicely, should give us a pretty good reading of lateral velocity. Once that was accomplished, we do one more integration, and obtain lateral position. Since all we really need for position hold is a relative position, we could experiement with resetting the position integration at some time interval (or every time the sticks are released) to keep our drift error down. How cool would this be if it actually worked?!!

I am thinking to buy an ArduIMU v3 just to play around with this to see if I can get a robust measurement.

Please chime in on this! If this worked even remotely well, there may no longer be a need for optical flow, or even sonar (as we could get relative Z position too)!

-Jamie