Distributed Hybrid Attitude Estimation for Multi-agent Systems on SO(3)

We consider the problem of distributed attitude estimation of multi-agent systems, evolving on SO(3), relying on individual angular velocity and relative attitude measurements. We propose a nonlinear distributed hybrid attitude estimation scheme guaranteeing global asymptotic convergence of the attitude estimation errors to a common constant orientation, under an undirected, connected and acyclic graph topology. Moreover, in the presence of a leader in the group (knowing its absolute orientation), one can guarantee global asymptotic convergence of the attitude estimation errors to zero. Numerical simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance of our proposed scheme.