A Two-Step Strategy to Fuse Height Measurements for Low-Cost Quadrotors

For low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), it is practically important to estimate flight height using the measurements from low-cost accelerometer and barometer sensors. In this paper, we propose a simple two-step strategy to fuse the measurements from the two sensors. In the first step, two different filters, moving average filter and Kalman filter, are adopted to preprocess the measurements from accelerometer and barometer, respectively. In the second step, a properly designed complementary filter is employed for high-precision height estimation. A large number of experimental comparison results on a small-size quadrotor demonstrate the effectiveness of the strategy.