Attitude-Induced error modeling and compensation with GRU networks for the polarization compass during UAV orientation

The polarization compass used for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation is usually hypothesized to be arranged horizontally in conventional heading measurement, which leads to a noticeable heading error due to the inevitable tilts called the pitch angle and the roll angle during UAV flight process. In addition, we found that the coupling of the angle between the solar meridian and the body axis of a carrier (A-SMBA) and tilted-angles will produce more remarkable heading errors. Consequently, we first introduce a comprehensive analysis of heading error in terms of variable attitude angles of the compass including the A-SMBA, the pitch angle and the roll angle. A novel heading error modeling and compensation for attitude-changed of the polarization compass by gated recurrent unit (GRU) neural network is developed subsequently. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed heading error modeling and compensation method performs best compared to state-of-the-art algorithms in predicting the UAV orientation.