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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
Accurate Attitude Estimation of a Moving Land
Vehicle Using Low-Cost MEMS IMU Sensors
Hamad Ahmed, Member, IEEE, and Muhammad Tahir, Member, IEEE
Abstract— This paper presents a novel Kalman filter for the
accurate determination of a vehicle’s attitude (pitch and roll
angles) using a low-cost MEMS inertial measurement unit (IMU)
sensor, comprising a tri-axial gyroscope and a tri-axial accelerom-
eter. Currently, vehicles deploy expensive gyroscopes for atti-
tude determination. A low-cost MEMS gyro cannot be used
because of the drift problem. Typically, an accelerometer is used
to correct this drift by measuring the attitude from gravita-
tional acceleration. This is, however, not possible in vehicular
applications, because accelerometer measurements are corrupted
by external accelerations produced due to vehicle movements.
In this paper, we show that vehicle kinematics allow the removal
of external accelerations from the lateral and vertical axis
accelerometer measurements, thus giving the correct estimate of
lateral and vertical axis gravitational accelerations. An estimate
of the longitudinal axis gravitational acceleration can then be
obtained by using the vector norm property of gravitational
acceleration. A Kalman filter is designed, which implements the
proposed solution and uses the accelerometer in conjunction
with the gyroscope to accurately determine the attitude of a
vehicle. Hence, this paper enables the use of extremely low-cost
MEMS IMU for accurate attitude determination in vehicular
domain for the first time. The proposed filter was tested by both
simulations and experiments under various dynamic conditions
and results were compared with five existing methods from
the literature. The proposed filter was able to maintain sub-
degree estimation accuracy even under very severe and prolonged
dynamic conditions. To signify the importance of the achieved
accuracy in determining accurate attitude, we investigated its use
in two vehicular applications: vehicle yaw estimate and vehicle
location estimate by dead reckoning and showed the performance
improvements obtained by the proposed filter.
Index Terms— Vehicle attitude, attitude estimation, external
acceleration, MEMS IMU, Kalman filter.
I. I NTRODUCTION
V EHICLE population around the globe crossed the
1.2 billion mark in 2014 and this number is expected
to grow only incrementally in the years to come. Owing to
the escalated use of vehicles on the roads, several advances
have been made in vehicular technology to assist the drivers
and make driving an effortless, comfortable and a safe task [1].
These systems include driver assistance systems (active cruise
Manuscript received March 22, 2016; revised July 22, 2016 and
September 28, 2016; accepted October 28, 2016. The Associate Editor for
this paper was A. Hegyi.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering,
Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, Lahore University
of Management Sciences, Lahore 54792, Pakistan (e-mail:
hamad.ahmed@lums.edu.pk; tahir@lums.edu.pk).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TITS.2016.2627536
1524-9050 © 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
1
control [2], lane keeping [3], assisted parking [4]), vehi-
cle stability systems (yaw stability control [5], roll stability
control [6], suspension control [7]) and vehicle safety sys-
tems (crash avoidance by active steering [8], roll over
mitigation [9]). The foremost requirement for all these systems
is an accurate knowledge of the vehicular states at all times.
These vehicular states include vehicle attitude, vehicle speeds
and vehicle accelerations (longitudinal, lateral and vertical).
Due to the highly critical nature and low latency requirement
of a driving related system, high precision sensors are required
to obtain a very accurate estimate of these states. The cost of
these sensors serves as an inhibitive factor towards using them
in vehicles covering a wide range of prices. Subsequently,
these assistance and safety systems have seen deployment in
only expensive sophisticated vehicles uptill now and remain
unreachable to the general masses.
In recent years, much research effort has been directed
towards developing affordable sensors for automotive
applications [10]–[12]. When designing a sensor for driving
applications, two requirements have to be met. First, the sensor
should give continuous measurements under all circumstances.
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is not a viable option
due to this requirement, as it suffers from signal outage in
urban areas, parking lots and tunnels etc [13], [14]. Secondly,
the sensor must show robust performance under all vehicle
maneuvers regardless of their severity or duration.
Consequently, low cost Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) are
not viable because their estimation error grows under severe
and prolonged maneuvers [15].
Automotive grade gyroscopes are the simplest and most
accurate sensors for determining the attitude of a vehicle.
A tri-axial gyroscope measures angular velocities along all
three axis which are integrated w.r.t. time to obtain the attitude
angles. The integration process also accumulates any noise or
bias, if present in the sensor measurements and the estimate
can drift away with time. Hence a near perfect measurement
requirement is imposed on the gyroscope. Automotive gyro-
scopes use ring-laser or fiber-optic technology and deliver the
level of accuracy necessary for driving applications. However
as mentioned before, their cost is strictly prohibitive and
sometimes, comparable to the price of the vehicle itself.
The advent of MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems)
technology has shrunk both the size and cost of inertial
sensors [16]. Now miniature gyroscopes and accelerometers
are available at a very low cost but their performance is too
much degraded to be used in vehicular applications. While an
automotive grade gyroscope typically gives drift performance
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2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
TABLE I
C OMPARISON OF THE S PECIFICATIONS AND P RICES OF VARIOUS G YROSCOPES .1
of 1°/hour, a MEMS gyroscope has a typical performance
of 70°/hour [17]. Moreover this bias is subject to variations
due to temperature as well [18]. Though work is being done
to improve the quality of MEMS gyroscopes and make them
robust to vibrations and other noise sources for automotive
applications [19], the drift issue still remains unmitigated.
A comparison of the performance characteristics and prices
of automotive grade and MEMS gyroscopes is presented in
Table I. The trend of performance deterioration resulting from
the decrease in cost is easily noticeable. Even a nominal auto-
motive grade gyroscope costs approximately 10, 000 USD.
The goal of this paper is to enable the cheapest gyroscope
(price in the range of 10 USD) to function accurately in
vehicular applications.
A typical MEMS gyroscope suffers from the drift problem
and cannot provide an attitude estimate alone. A MEMS
accelerometer is usually packaged with this gyroscope to form
an Inertial Measurement unit (IMU). A tri-axial accelerom-
eter measures the gravitational force of acceleration, and
its orientation can be determined by the modulation of the
gravity vector about its axes [20] but these measurements
are very noisy even under very stable conditions [21]. Thus
both of these sensors are fused using either complementary
filters [22] or Kalman filters [23], [24] to overcome their
individual shortcomings and obtain an overall accurate attitude
estimate. This fusion works very well for static or quasi-static
state because the accelerometer readings are dominated by
the gravitational acceleration but in dynamical conditions, the
accelerometer measures the linear or external acceleration as
well, rendering its measurements unusable for attitude deter-
mination. A compensation of this external acceleration has
to be somehow done to extract the gravitational acceleration
measurement and determine the attitude. Only then it can
be fused with the gyroscope estimate. Another implication
of this problem is the inability of using an accelerometer
to measure vehicular accelerations because it measures the
gravitational accelerations as well. If the attitude is accu-
rately known then these gravitational forces can be canceled
out to determine only the linear acceleration of the
vehicle.
1 Pricing as of January 2016.
In this paper, we use the kinematic model of a vehicle
to estimate and subtract the external accelerations from the
accelerometer measurements and fuse them with the gyro-
scope measurements to accurately determine the vehicle atti-
tude. Specifically, we observe that the external accelerations
along the lateral and vertical axis of a vehicle are either
centripetal accelerations about the respective axes, which
can be calculated, or small linear acceleration components
which can be accurately estimated using a first order process
model. Subtracting these external accelerations give the correct
gravitational acceleration measurements along the lateral and
vertical axes. The same cannot be done for the longitudinal
axis because significant external accelerations are present in it
when the vehicle is accelerating/braking which can neither be
calculated nor accurately estimated through a model. However,
since we have the lateral and vertical gravitational acceleration
components, we can determine the longitudinal component by
using the fact that magnitude of the vector norm of the three
components should equal 9.8m/s 2 . Thus we get an attitude
estimate by determining all three gravitational accelerations
and fuse it with the gyroscope estimate. Accurately determin-
ing the attitude also enables us to accurately determine the
linear accelerations of a vehicle which is useful for several
applications requiring velocity or position of the car. This
method discards the longitudinal accelerometer measurement
during attitude estimation hence it is immune to the duration
or severity of the external accelerations caused by vehicle
movement. Enabling the MEMS accelerometer to provide
a correct attitude estimate allows the use of a very low
quality MEMS gyroscope as fusion of both of these sensors
will eventually overcome their individual shortcomings, as
discussed before and will provide better estimation accuracy.
The proposed solution is implemented and tested on the cheap-
est MEMS IMU to confirm its performance in demanding
vehicular applications. The results are also compared with
existing methods in the literature to highlight the significant
performance improvement obtained by the proposed solution.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II
reviews the literature with respect to the attitude estimation
problem. Section III presents the formulation of the proposed
filter. Section IV details the testing of the filter through
simulations as well as comparison with previous techniques.
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AHMED AND TAHIR: ACCURATE ATTITUDE ESTIMATION OF A MOVING LAND VEHICLE
Two applications are also presented where a significant perfor-
mance improvement is achieved by using the proposed attitude
estimation method. Section V shows filter results over real
driving data. Finally, the work is concluded in Section VI.
II. R ELATED W ORK
We provide below, a very brief review of the literature
addressing three aspects: different attitude representations
used, different attitude estimation methods used and different
methods used to deal with external acceleration problem.
A. Attitude Representation
Three main approaches are used for attitude representation
while constructing a Kalman filter algorithm in the litera-
ture. First is the Euler Angle representation in which the
pitch (θ ), roll (φ) and yaw (ψ) angles are directly used as state
variables [25]. It is the simplest approach however it makes
the Kalman Filter non-linear by introducing trigonometric
functions into its measurement model. The second is the
Direction Cosine Matrix (DCM) representation in which those
elements of the DCM that are involved in pitch and roll
calculation are used as state variables [26]–[29]. This approach
allows the construction of a linear Kalman Filter but suffers
from singularity under certain values of pitch and roll. The
third is the quaternion approach which represents orientations
in four dimensions [30]–[32]. It allows a linear Kalman Filter
and does not suffer from singularity however the dimensions
of the system are increased to four.
B. Attitude Estimation Methods
Several sensors including camera [33], LIDAR [34] and
GPS [35] have been used to estimate the attitude of both static
or accelerated vehicles however these are costly and involve
expensive computational algorithms.
Perhaps the simplest method for attitude determination is
by using only a gyroscope, but as discussed before, it requires
gyroscopes of extremely high accuracy. The conventional
INS theory [36] is also based on this technique assuming very
accurate sensors. Modern aircrafts still use it with very accu-
rate mechanical gyros that give sub-degree drift performance
per hour. Their electrical counter-parts have also been created
using ring-laser and fiber-optic technologies. These gyroscopes
are very expensive and not cost effective to be used in a mass
production vehicle.
Now a days, low-quality gyros fabricated using MEMS
technology are available however they exhibit a time varying
bias which causes the integral to drift away with time [37].
To correct the bias, a periodic reference of the attitude from
another sensor is needed. Both magnetometers and accelerom-
eters can be used to complement the gyroscope.
A tri-axial magnetometer measures the Earth’s magnetic
field acting upon its three axes. Any change in the orientation
of the sensor changes the modulation of this magnetic field
vector allowing estimation of the change in orientation [38].
However the magnetometers are highly susceptible to mag-
netic interferences from surrounding magnetic materials and
often serve as an inaccurate source of reference for comple-
menting the gyroscope.
3
An accelerometer is a good choice for complementing
the gyroscope however if the vehicle is accelerating then
the accelerometer also measures the external accelerations
in addition to the gravitational acceleration. A compensation
is required to remove this external acceleration from the
measurements for correct attitude estimation.
C. Dealing With External Acceleration
Four popular types of approaches exist in the literature for
dealing with the problem of external acceleration: threshold
based switching techniques, adaptive estimation techniques,
model based estimation of external acceleration and direct
estimation of external acceleration.
In threshold based switching approaches, a threshold is
defined for the accelerometer measurements, i.e. if their norm
is close to 9.8m/s 2 then the accelerometer is termed as
static otherwise it is said to be in dynamic conditions. Under
dynamic conditions, the estimation of attitude is provided
using only gyroscope. As soon as the accelerometer is static,
its measurement is again used as a reference to correct the
gyroscope drift [26], [27], [31], [39]. Instead of using a hard
threshold, a fuzzy logic based system to detect the dynamic
conditions has also been proposed [40]. All these threshold
based systems are only able to maintain the estimation accu-
racy for a short amount of time during dynamic conditions
since the gyroscope starts to drift if not corrected for a certain
duration. Also, the threshold based state (static or dynamic
condition) determination induces error in the estimation since
noise and faulty conditions can lead to the incorrect detection
of the state.
Instead of using a threshold, an adaptive method which esti-
mates the amount of external acceleration from the residual of
the Kalman Filter and correspondingly decreases the weights
of the accelerometer corrections to decrease their effect on the
attitude estimate, has also been proposed [32]. This method
alleviates the problem of incorrect state estimation but the
attitude estimate in this method is again dependent on the
gyroscope only and tends to drift if the dynamic condition
lasts for a prolonged duration.
In model based estimation approach, the external accel-
eration is modeled as a first order low pass process and
adaptively estimated from the filter [28], [41]. This approach
is seemingly more accurate then the threshold or adaptive
estimation approach but due to a naive model of the external
acceleration, it loses its accuracy under severe and prolonged
accelerated conditions. Lee et al. [41] make a comment in the
concluding section of the paper that this technique cannot work
in a moving land vehicle where the acceleration disturbances
are lengthy and severe.
In direct external acceleration estimation approach, the
external acceleration is somehow determined and subtracted
from the accelerometer. The invention in [42] uses a wheel
speed sensor to estimate the longitudinal acceleration and
subtract it from the longitudinal accelerometer measurement
while the lateral and vertical accelerations are ignored. This
method requires installation of extra wheel speed sensors and
cannot function during conditions that cause lateral or vertical
accelerations. In [43], one pitch estimate is obtained using
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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

only the longitudinal accelerometer measurement and another measurements. These measurements are compensated for
pitch estimate is obtained using only the vertical accelerom- centripetal, lateral and vertical accelerations.
eter measurement. Roll measurement is not considered. • In the second step, a measurement for the longitudinal
A reference selector selects the either one of the two estimates gravity component is formed by using the updated lateral
based on which one has lesser external acceleration. This and vertical components of the state vector from the first
method is not applicable for low quality sensors because pitch step and the second measurement update is applied using
estimate from vertical acceleration estimate suffers from large this measurement.
errors due to measurement noise. Oh and Choi [44], [45]
first estimate the longitudinal velocity from wheel speed A. Sensor Models
sensors and lateral velocity from bicycle model & a model
for tire cornering stiffness, then use it in a kinematic model The system uses three sensors: tri-axial accelerometer, tri-
to determine the longitudinal and vertical velocities. They axial gyroscope and the vehicle speed obtained from the
differentiate these velocities w.r.t. time to obtain the respective CAN (Controller Area Network) bus which is provided on
external accelerations. Though the results presented in the all commercially available vehicles. The measurements from
paper are accurate but this approach has several shortcomings. these sensors at time instant t can be expressed in the vehicle
To compute longitudinal velocity, individual wheel speeds are coordinate frame as:
required. To compute lateral velocity, the slip angle is required
yG t = ω t + n G (1a)
and cornering stiffness has been estimated by a linear model
whereas it is highly non-linear during severe maneuvers. This y At = gt + at + n A (1b)
estimation error in lateral velocity propagates into other veloc- yv t = v t + n v (1c)
ity estimates, deteriorating the overall estimation performance.  T
where yG t is a vector G xt G yt G zt containing the actual
III. M ETHODOLOGY gyroscope measurements about the x, y and z-axis of the
vehicle coordinate frame. These  measurements
T are a sum of
As discussed before, the complication in using a low cost the true angular rates ωt = ωxt ω yt ωzt about each axis
IMU for attitude estimation of a vehicle lies in the fact that and zero mean white Gaussian noise in each axis contained in
T
gyroscope suffers from the drift problem and no aiding sensor the vector nG . In (1b), y At is a vector A xt A yt A zt which
is available to correct the drift because accelerometer measure- contains the actual accelerometer measurements about the x, y
ments are corrupted by external accelerations. Only if these  T
and z-axis. These are a sum of the vector gt = gxt g yt gzt
accelerations could somehow be removed then the accelerom-  T
eter would be able to aid the gyroscope in determining the containing the gravitational accelerations, at = axt a yt azt
correct attitude. Though external accelerations along lateral containing the external accelerations and white Gaussian noise
and vertical axes are removable due to specific kinematics vector n A . Similarly in (1c), yv t is the speed reading from the
of a moving vehicle, accelerations along longitudinal axis CAN bus of the vehicle, v t is the actual vehicle speed and
remain a problem and cannot be determined and removed. n v is the measurement noise.
We noted that by at least obtaining the correct gravitational
acceleration along the lateral and vertical axes, the longitudinal B. State Vector
gravitational acceleration can be determined by virtue of the
While choosing an attitude representation for the Kalman
vector norm property of gravitational acceleration i.e. the mag-
Filter, we noted that during the typical motion of land vehicle,
nitude of norm of the three components should equal 9.8m/s 2 .
pitch or roll angles are never 90° and the singularity condition
Determining all three gravitational accelerations enables the
does not occur. Hence the Direction Cosine Matrix approach
accelerometer to be fused with the gyroscope providing the
for formulating the state vector is the most suitable since it
correct attitude of the vehicle.
allows a linear Kalman filter and the dimensions are only three.
The proposed filter is motivated by this discussion however
Let us denote the pitch, roll and heading of a vehicle by θ ,
we make a slight improvement to increase the accuracy.
φ and ψ respectively. The relationship between the Earth and
An accelerometer is a noisy sensor and trying
 to determine the
Vehicle coordinate frames E X and V X can be expressed as
longitudinal acceleration by Along = 9.82 − Alat 2 − A2
vert
where A denotes the accelerometer measurement, would be E
X = R.V X (2)
even more noisy because it will be influenced by the noise of
both lateral and vertical axis measurements. In order to deal where R is the rotation matrix to rotate any vector in the
with this issue, we formulate a Kalman filter to implement vehicle coordinate frame (V X) into the Earth coordinate
the complete fusion process by considering the state vector frame ( E X). This rotation matrix is given by
as a 3 dimensional vector representing the orientation of the ⎡ ⎤
cψcθ cψsθ sφ − sψcφ cψsθ cφ + sψsφ
vehicle w.r.t. the Earth coordinate frame. The filter first updates R = ⎣sψcθ sψsθ sφ + cψcφ sψsθ cφ − cψsφ ⎦ (3)
the state estimate using gyroscope as the process model and −sθ cθ sφ cθ cφ
then performs the measurement update in two steps.
• In the first step, only the lateral and vertical components where c and s denote the cos and si n operations. We observe
of the state vector are updated from the accelerometer that the last row of the rotation matrix does not contain the
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AHMED AND TAHIR: ACCURATE ATTITUDE ESTIMATION OF A MOVING LAND VEHICLE 5

yaw angle and we can calculate pitch and roll angles using we obtain our state transition matrix and a model for process
noise
R32
φ = atan
R33 t −1 = I3 + t ỹG t−1 (11a)
−R31 wt −1 = t x̃t −1 nG (11b)
θ = atan
R32 /si nφ Though the process noise wt −1 appears to be state-dependent
where Ri j denotes the (i, j )t h
element of R. Using any in (11b), it does not violate any underlying assumption of the
of the other two rows for computing pitch and roll will Kalman filter (see [47]). The process noise covariance Qt −1
require computing the yaw angle as well, which requires a is given by
magnetometer sensor and is beyond the scope of this paper. Qt −1 = E[wt −1 wtT−1 ] (12)
We define our state vector at time t as
⎡ ⎤ Substituting (11b) into (12) and using x̃tT−1 = −x̃t −1 we get
R31
xt = ⎣ R32 ⎦ (4) Qt −1 = −t 2 x̃t −1  G x̃t −1 (13)
R33
Here   G is the
 covariance matrix of gyroscope’s noise given
Also note that in Eq (1b), the gravitational acceleration by E nG nTG which is set equal to σG2 I3 by assuming that
vector gt at any time t as measured in the vehicle coordinate variance of gyroscope noise σG2 is same along all three axes.
frame is given by Note that our Kalman filter uses sensor measurements in both
the process model (11a) and measurement model (to follow),
gt = gxt (5) this type of formulation is common in sensor fusion [31], [41].
where g is the gravitational acceleration constant 9.81m/s 2 .
D. Measurement Model
C. Process Model The purpose of the measurement update is to mitigate the
The general equation for the process model is given by error propagated in the state estimate by the process model.
Since we will apply the measurement update in two steps, the
xt = t −1 xt −1 + wt −1 (6) general equations of these measurement models are given by

where t −1 is the state transition matrix and wt −1 is the
process noise with covariance matrix Qt −1 . The expressions
for t −1 and Qt −1 are derived below.
To determine the state vector xt from xt −1 , we use the fact
that the rotation matrix at time t, Rt , can be computed from
Rt −1 using the integral of the vector differential equation [46]:
Rt = Rt −1 (I 3 + t ω̃t −1 )
where t is the sampling time interval, ωt −1 contains the ideal
angular rates of rotation of the body and ∼ is a cross product
operator on a 3 × 1 vector p such that [46]:
⎡ ⎤
0 − p3 p2
p̃ = ⎣ p3 0 − p1⎦ (8)
− p2 p1 0
Since we are only interested in the 3rd row of Rt which is
our state vector, so instead of using (7) we can directly use
xt = (I 3 + t ω̃ t −1 )xt −1 .
As the ideal angular rates ωt −1 are not known in practice and
are measured by the gyroscope, we substitute (1a) into (9) and
use the identity 
p − q = p̃ − q̃ to get
xt = (I 3 + t ỹG t−1 − t ñG )xt −1
= (I 3 + t ỹG t−1 )xt −1 − t ñG xt −1
= (I 3 + t ỹG t−1 )xt −1 + t x̃t −1 nG
where the last equation is obtained by using identity
ãb = −b̃a. Comparing (10) with the process model in (6),
zt,1 = H1 xt + ϒ t,1 (14a)
z t,2 = H2 xt + ϒ t,2 (14b)
where zt,1 and z t,2 are the measurement vectors, H1 and H2
are the observation matrices and ϒ t,1 and ϒ t,1 are the mea-
surement noise with covariance matrices Mt,1 and Mt,2 for
updates 1 and 2 respectively.
(7) We will use the accelerometer measurements y At for the
measurement updates which were defined in (1b) as a sum of
the gravitational gt and external acceleration at components.
If at were zero, y At would only consist of gt and could
be directly used for measurement update, however external
accelerations are always present when the vehicle is moving
and need to be subtracted from y At before using it for the
measurement update.
To determine these external accelerations, we resolve them
into their constituent components using the kinematic model
of a car. If the directions of velocities and angular rates are
taken as in Fig. 1, the external accelerations are given by [48]
(9)
axt = v̇ xt − ωzt .v yt + ωxt .v zt (15a)
a yt = v̇ yt + ωzt .v xt − ω yt .v zt (15b)
azt = v̇ zt − ωxt .v xt + ω yt .v yt (15c)
Note that the term ‘kinematic model’ does not refer to a
dynamical model for the car which can be used for state tran-
sition, rather it just resolves the accelerations into constituent
(10) components. In (15a), v̇ xt cannot be estimated by the available
sensors and is too significant to ignore. Though v t read from
CAN bus in (1c) can be used as the longitudinal velocity v xt
of the vehicle but it cannot be differentiated to obtain v̇ xt
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6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

where αt is an external acceleration component at time t,

ca is a dimensionless constant which determines the cut-off
frequency and t is the error in this model. Modeling v̇ yt and
v̇ zt by α yt and αzt according to (16), we obtain
α yt = ca1 .α yt−1 + yt (17a)
αzt = ca2 .αzt−1 + zt (17b)
For simplicity, we take ca1 = ca2 = ca . Substituting these
in (15a) & (15b) and ignoring the negligible products ω yt .v zt
& ω yt .v yt , we obtain

Fig. 1. Directions of linear and angular velocities. a yt = ca .α yt−1 + ωzt .v xt + yt (18a)

azt = ca .αzt−1 − ωxt .v xt + zt (18b)
1) Measurement Update 1: Substituting gyroscope and
CAN bus measurements from (1a) and (1c) into (18a)
and (18b), we obtain
a yt = ca .α yt−1 + (G zt − n G z ).(yv t − n v ) + yt (19a)
azt = ca .αzt−1 − (G xt − n G x ).(yv t − n v ) + zt (19b)
which can be re-arranged in matrix form as
at,1 = ca .α t −1 + yG t,1 .v t + nG,1 .nv,1 +  t (20)
 T  T
where at,1 = a yt azt , α t −1 = α yt−1 αzt−1 ,
 T  T  T
yG t,1 = G zt −G xt , nG,1 = n G z n G x , nv,1 = n v n v
 T
and  t = yt z t . Note that here we are ignoring the
cross-product terms for simplicity because eventually their
contribution to the measurement noise will be negligible. For
the first update, we discard the x-axis accelerometer reading
Fig. 2. Comparison of actual vehicle speed and speed coming from
a CAN bus. and apply the update from y- and z-axes readings. Hence the
accelerometer measurement for this update can be arranged in
because the speed given by the CAN bus is a very low rate the vector form as
approximation of the actual speed as demonstrated in Fig. 2  T
y At,1 = A yt A zt (21)
which shows the actual (coming from GPS sensor) and the
CAN bus recorded speed of a vehicle during a test drive, From (20), (21) and (1b), we obtain
thus its differentiation will yield an incorrect estimate of v̇ xt .
So we have to discard the x-axis accelerometer measurements y At,1 = Hm gxt + ca .α t −1 + yG t,1 .v t + nG,1 .nv,1 +  t + n A,1
because we cannot determine the external acceleration axt (22)
and subtract from it. We can however, determine a yt and azt
from (15b) and (15c) and subtract from y and z-axes where Hm is a matrix which maps three dimensional state
accelerometer readings to form the measurement vector zt,1 vector to two dimensional measurement vector y At,1 and n A,1
which will update the state vector xt in the first measurement is a vector
 containing
T last two entries of n A in (1b) i.e.
update. n A,1 = n A y n Az . Now, we can write
It is important to note that the most significant quantities
y At,1 − ca .α t −1 − yG t,1 .v t = Hm gxt + nG,1 .nv,1 +  t + n A,1
in (15b) and (15c) are the longitudinal velocity v xt , and the
yaw rate ωzt which is observed when the vehicle is being (23)
turned. The velocities v yt and v zt should ideally be zero, Comparing with the measurement model in (14a) we get
however when the tires are being steered, a small lateral
velocity component v yt is experienced due to the tire cornering zt,1 = y At,1 − ca .α t −1 − yG t,1 .v t (24a)
stiffness. Likewise, when the car hits a bump on the road, a 010
small vertical velocity component v zt is observed. Since these H1 = g Hm = g (24b)
001
components are small and short lived, we can model their
ϒ t,1 =  t + nG,1 .nv,1 + n A,1 (24c)
derivatives i.e. v̇ yt and v̇ zt using the following first order low
pass process: The measurement noise covariance Mt,1 is
αt = ca .αt −1 + t (16) Mt,1 = E[ϒ t,1 ϒ t,1
T
] (25)
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AHMED AND TAHIR: ACCURATE ATTITUDE ESTIMATION OF A MOVING LAND VEHICLE 7

Under the assumption that  t , nG,1 nv,1 and n A,1 are uncorre-
lated, we can write Mt,1 as
Mt,1 =  αt +  G V +  A (26)
Here,  G V is the measurement noise from the velocity and
gyroscope product terms which is set equal to σv2 σg2 I 2 .  A is
the accelerometer noise which is set equal to σ A2 I 2 assuming
that the accelerometer variance is the same along both y and
z axes.  αt is the contribution to the measurement noise by
 
the model based estimation of α t which is given by E  t  tT .
Since it cannot be determined analytically, it is approximated
by  αt = 2−1 ca2 ||α t −1 ||2 as suggested in [41].
2) Measurement Update 2: In measurement update 1, we
used the y and z-axes accelerometer readings to obtain the
corrected estimates of xt (2) and xt (3) where xt (i ) indicates
the i -th element of the state vector xt in (4). We note
from (3) that the state vector has the property
xt (1)2 + xt (2)2 + xt (3)2 = 1. Thus given the fact that
we have obtained correct estimates of xt (2) and xt (3), we
can use the above property to calculate 1 − xt (2)2 − xt (3)2
which is an estimate of the xt (1) and can be used as a
measurement for correcting the state vector in next step.
We denote this measurement by yxt .
yxt = 1 − xt (2)2 − xt (3)2 + δt (27)
where δt is the noise in this measurement.
yxt = xt (1) + δt (28)
Comparing with Eq (14b), we obtain
z t,2 = yxt (29a)
 
H2 = 1 0 0 (29b)
ϒt,2 = δt (29c)
 T Fig. 3. Proposed filter’s structure.
The measurement noise covariance Mt,2 is given by E δt δt
and can be tuned to give acceptable performance. Note that
(27) is non-linear, but the actual system is still linear (29b)
4) Compute Kalman gain for the first measurement update
and does not require any special treatment such as EKF etc.
Kt,1 = P− T − T
t H1 (H1 Pt H1 + Mt,1 )
−1
(33)
E. Filter Procedure
5) Apply the first measurement update
The Kalman filter algorithm using the above models is
described below and the procedure is summarized in Fig. 3. x+ − −
t = xt + Kt,1 (zt,1 − H1 xt ) (34)
The − superscript denotes the a priori estimate, + superscript
denotes the a posteriori estimate after first measurement 6) Compute the error covariance matrix after first update
update and ++ denotes the a posteriori estimate after the P+ −
t = (I − Kt,1 H1 )Pt (35)
second measurement update. Pt is the error covariance matrix
and Kt,1 & Kt,2 are the Kalman gains for the first and second 7) Form the second measurement
measurement updates respectively at time t. (a) 
z t,2 = 1 − xt (2)+ − xt (3)+
2 2
1) Compute the a priori state estimate (36)
x−
t = t −1 x++
t −1 (30) 8) Compute Kalman gain for the second measurement
update
2) Compute the a priori error covariance matrix
P− ++ T Kt,2 = P+ T + T
t H2 (H2 Pt H2 + Mt,2 )
−1
(37)
t = t −1 Pt −1 t −1 + Qt −1 (31)
3) Form the first measurement 9) Apply the second measurement update

zt,1 = y At,1 − v t .yG t,1 − ca .α t −1 (32) x++

t = x+ +
t + Kt,2 (z t,2 − H2 xt ) (38)
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8 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

10) Compute the a posteriori error covariance matrix 2) Method 2 [23]:

The measurement model uses the accelerometer without
P++
t = (I − Kt,2 H2 )P+
t (39)
considering or dealing with external accelerations.
We can calculate the roll and pitch angles from the a posteriori
zt = y A t , Mt = σ A3 I3 (45)
state estimate
x++
t (1) −x++
t (1)
3) Method 3 [27]:
φt = atan θt = atan (40) The filter uses only gyroscope for attitude estimation
x++
t (2)
++
xt (2)/si nφt
while the device is experiencing dynamic conditions.
The external accelerations at can be calculated using the A threshold for detecting the dynamic conditions is used.
accelerometer measurements and a-posteriori state estimate
zt = y A t (46a)
at = y A − gx++ (41) ⎧
t ⎨σ A3 I3 , i f | ||y A || − g| ≤ A ∀τ ∈ [t − nt, t]
τ
These external accelerations are a sum of the centripetal Mt = (46b)
⎩∞ Other wi se
accelerations and linear acceleration components. We can
separate the linear acceleration components for use in step (c) where A is the threshold by which the norm of the
of the next iteration by accelerometer outputs must exceed 9.8m/s 2 and n is
α t = at − v t .yG (t, 1) (42) the number of consecutive times this should happen to
trigger the dynamic condition.
4) Method 4 [32]:
IV. S IMULATIONS
The measurement noise covariance is adaptively
To verify the proposed algorithm’s performance, it was increased in dynamic conditions instead of switching it
first tested on simulated sensor data generated in MATLAB to infinity.
Simulink. The purpose of these simulations was to test the
algorithm’s performance under a host of dynamic conditions zt = y A t , Mt = σ A3 I3 +  acc (47)
and verifying its performance under all possible driving sce- where
narios. Also, to establish that the filter is able to maintain
its performance with very low quality sensors as well, the  acc = 3−1 ||rt ||2 I3 , with rt = zt − Hx−
t (48)
simulated sensor’s quality was varied to see the performance
5) Method 5 [41]:
deterioration vs sensor quality.
The external acceleration is modeled as a first-order low-
A. Simulation Environment pass filtered white noise process (Eq. 49) and estimated
adaptively from the filter.
IMU sensors were set up to provide data at 100√Hz sampling
√ set to 0.2 mg/ H z for the
rate. The noise variances were at = ca at −1 (49)
accelerometer and 0.03 d ps/ H z for the gyroscope to match zt = y At − ca at −1 , Mt = σ A3 I3 +  acc (50)
the MEMS IMU from ST Microelectronics. Mt,2 was tuned
to 0.0001. Accelerations were deliberately added to each of the where
accelerometer axes to simulate different driving conditions.  acc = 3−1 ca2 ||at −1 ||2 I3 (51)
B. Various Reference Methods and at is obtained from the a-posteriori state estimate by
We compared our results with five methods present in at = y At − gx+
t (52)
the literature. All these methods were implemented using
the same process model as given in Eqs. (6), (11a) & (13).
The difference being in the use of the accelerometer measure- C. Various Test Conditions
ments. All these filters used a one step measurement update as: In order to test and compare the accuracy of the proposed
method, seven different tests w.r.t. the magnitude and duration
Kt = P− T − T
t H (HPt H + Mt )
−1
of external accelerations were performed. In real scenarios,
+ − −
xt = xt + Kt (zt − Hxk ) the lateral axis of the vehicle experiences accelerations
P+
t = (I − Kt H)Pt
− only for short durations, when the vehicle is making turns.
Hence tests with accelerations of different magnitude but
at = y A,t − gx+
t
short duration in the lateral direction were performed. The
(a) longitudinal axis observes prolonged accelerations hence tests
1) Method 1: with both magnitude and duration of longitudinal acceleration
The attitude is estimated using only the gyroscope and were performed. The details of each test is given below and
accelerometer is not used for correction. This can be the average and maximum magnitude of accelerations are
achieved by setting the measurement noise covariance shown in Table II. T1:
to infinity. 1) Vehicle is static (No External Accelerations)
2) Vehicle is in steady state (No Longitudinal Acceleration)
zt = y A t , Mt = ∞I3 (44) and makes a soft turn (Minor Lateral Acceleration)
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AHMED AND TAHIR: ACCURATE ATTITUDE ESTIMATION OF A MOVING LAND VEHICLE
TABLE II
A CCELERATIONS A DDED D URING T ESTS
3) Vehicle is in steady state and makes a hard turn (Severe
Lateral Acceleration)
4) Vehicle is softly accelerating/braking (Minor Longitudi-
nal Acceleration).
5) Vehicle is aggressively accelerating/braking (Severe
Longitudinal Acceleration)
6) Vehicle is continuously accelerating/braking (Prolonged
Longitudinal Accelerations)
7) Vehicle is accelerating/braking, turning and hitting
bumps (Accelerations in all three axes)
The most challenging scenario is the last one in which
all three disturbances are present with severe magnitude.
Its purpose is to test the limitations of the proposed method.
D. Estimation Results
Simulation results for one run are shown in Fig. 4 in
the form of estimated pitch and roll angles. Table III and
Table IV provide the root mean square (RMS) error in attitude
estimation and external acceleration estimation respectively.
Note that the desired performance threshold here is set equal to
1 degree. Method 1 uses only gyroscope for estimation hence
its estimate is independent of any accelerations that might
be exerted upon the vehicle. This is evident from Fig 4(b)
where we can see the roll and pitch estimate drifting away
with time but not showing any effect of external acceleration.
Methods 2-5 and the proposed method use the accelerometer
measurements hence their performance will be affected by the
external accelerations. Method 3 also identifies the state of the
vehicle as either static or dynamic, which is shown in Fig. 4
as the ‘dynamic flag’ where positive value indicates dynamic
and negative indicates static state of the vehicle.
1) Test T1: During T1, no external accelerations are present
and all the algorithms give sub-degree estimation accuracy.
2) Test T2: Small lateral accelerations are added in this
test to simulate soft turning. Since these accelerations are
added along y-axis, the roll angle estimate is expected to
get corrupted. Methods 2 and 3 show the worst performance,
giving an error of the order of 5 degrees. Method 3 relies
on a threshold for dynamic condition detection, which is not
being detected for such minor acceleration. Method 4 does
not depend upon the threshold and adaptively tunes itself in
the presence of acceleration, hence its accuracy is better as
compared to Method 3. Method 5 shows better performance
than the rest because the external accelerations are of small
magnitude for little duration but its estimate still goes over one
9
degree performance threshold. The proposed method subtracts
the centripetal acceleration from the accelerometer hence it
remains unaffected by the disturbance as expected.
3) Test T3: In T3, considerable lateral accelerations are
added to simulate hard or aggressive turning. Method 2’s
estimation is severely deteriorated as expected however
Method 3’s estimation is better as compared to the previous
test. This can be attributed to the fact that hard accelerations
triggered the dynamic condition flag which shifted the esti-
mation to gyroscope only. Method 4 and 5’s accuracies are
also poor indicating that they are not able to maintain their
performance under severe dynamical conditions. One thing
evident from Method 5’s results is that it takes more time
to return to the reference value after the dynamic condition
has ended as compared to the other methods. The proposed
method remains unaffected by the severe disturbances because
they are being removed from the accelerometer measurements.
4) Test T4: In test T4, minor longitudinal accelerations
are added to simulate a vehicle softly accelerating/braking.
Method 2 gives erroneous estimates and Method 3 again
could not enter the dynamic mode for the whole test due
to the small magnitude of added accelerations. Method 4
showed lesser error than Method 3 however Method 5 was
able to maintain sub degree accuracy for these magnitudes
and duration of acceleration. The proposed method performed
exceedingly well showing that the measurement formed by
the accelerometer norm property is sufficient for attitude
estimation.
5) Test T5: In test T5, major longitudinal accelerations
are applied for hard acceleration/braking. All the algorithms
give deteriorated performance. Method 3 is able to detect
the dynamic condition but erroneous mode switching induces
large errors. Method 5 which was able to maintain sub-degree
accuracy during the previous test, could not do so here thus
establishing its limitation to handling external accelerations of
large magnitudes. However the proposed algorithm remained
unaffected by these accelerations because it does not use the
x-axis accelerometer measurements at all in the filter.
6) Test T6: Test T6 tests the algorithms for a long duration
of acceleration. This algorithm further exposes the shortcom-
ings of Methods 4 and 5 whose errors are observed to be
increasing continuously with time. Method 3 again suffers
from incorrect switching of the dynamical mode, further high-
lighting the state detection issue inherent to this approach. The
proposed method being immune to all x-axis accelerations,
maintain sub-degree estimation accuracy.
7) Test T7: In test T7, accelerations of different magnitudes
and durations are applied in all three axes. The purpose of this
test was to study the limit of each method. Only the proposed
filter was able to maintain its performance even for those
instants when all three axes contained external accelerations.
Remaining algorithms gave incomparable results. Method 5’s
estimation again monotonically drifts away with time.
E. External Acceleration Estimation
A bi-product of attitude estimation is the external acceler-
ation estimation because removing gravitational acceleration
from the accelerometer measurements leaves us with the
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10 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

Fig. 4. Estimation results of tests T1-T7. Thick dashed line indicates start and thin indicates end of test. (a) Accelerations used to corrupt sensor data
(b) Method 1 (c) Method 2 (d) Method 3 (e) Method 4 (f) Method 5 (g) Proposed method.

external accelerations. Fig. 5 shows the external accelerations centripetal accelerations along the respective axes observed
along all three axes measured by the proposed filter versus the by the vehicle during its motion and linear acceleration com-
reference accelerations. These accelerations are a sum of both ponents. Not only longitudinal and lateral accelerations have
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AHMED AND TAHIR: ACCURATE ATTITUDE ESTIMATION OF A MOVING LAND VEHICLE
TABLE III
RMS ATTITUDE E STIMATION E RROR IN DEGREES FOR T ESTS T1-T7
Fig. 5. External accelerations estimated by the proposed filter for the
total length of simulation. (a) x-axis external acceleration. (b) y-axis external
acceleration. (c) z-axis external acceleration.
been estimated but the vertical accelerations have also been
estimated accurately. The acceleration estimate is compared
with the estimation results from other techniques in Table IV.
The proposed filter shows the best estimation accuracy as
compared to the other methods. This accurate acceleration
estimation can help in determining the speed or position of
the vehicle as will be shown in next section.
F. Discussion
1) Immunity Against External Accelerations: The major
problem in using accelerometer for attitude estimation in
vehicular applications was the presence of external accel-
erations. While other reference methods proposed different
techniques to deal with these accelerations, their effect was
limited and the estimation errors grew under conditions of
11
TABLE IV
RMS A CCELERATION E STIMATION E RROR IN m/s 2
lengthy or severe accelerations. The proposed filter effectively
calculates the centripetal accelerations acting along the lateral
and vertical axis and estimates the linear accelerations by a
first order process, thus properly removing them from the
accelerometer measurements instead of switching to gyro
based estimation. The virtues of this technique are evident
in Tests T2 and T3 in the previous section when lateral
accelerations cause problems with the other techniques but the
proposed filter is able to maintain accuracy. The longitudinal
axis measurements are completely discarded which alleviates
the problem of having to deal with longitudinal accelerations.
The benefits are evident from Tests T4-T7 where neither the
duration nor the severity of accelerations has any effect on the
proposed filter. Hence the proposed method is most suitable
for automotive applications due to its ability to function in
acceleration conditions.
There is a slight similarity between Method 5 and the
proposed method. Method 5 uses the same first order process
model to deal with external accelerations as done in the
proposed filter. However this modeling process only works
for accelerations of short durations and mild magnitudes.
Method 5 applies this modeling on all three axes for all
accelerations due to which it fails, whereas the proposed
method only applies it only to the small linear acceler-
ation components in only the lateral and vertical axes,
which are incurred only under specific conditions and not
the centripetal acceleration components which are of larger
magnitudes.
2) Validity of Measurement 2: To verify whether the longi-
tudinal gravitational acceleration measurement formed by the
proposed method from the vector norm property of gravita-
tional acceleration is valid or not, it is compared with the
actual longitudinal gravitational acceleration in Fig. 6. It can
be seen that it is approximately the same as the true value
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12
Fig. 6. Measurement 2 formed by the filter.
Fig. 7. Estimation performance as a function of sensor quality. Dashed line
shows the performance threshold of 1 degree.
after the filter has converged. This confirms the validity of the
proposed idea and the integrity of measurement 2.
3) Robustness to Sensor Quality: The main objective of
this work is to determine the attitude of a vehicle using low
cost sensors. To test how much low can the senor quality go
before the proposed method’s estimation starts to deteriorate,
we simulated sensors of varying quality by increasing their
noise power and studied their effect on all estimation methods.
Only a small amount of external acceleration was added for a
short duration such that all the methods were able to maintain
sub degree accuracy when the sensor quality was good. Then
the sensor noise was gradually increased to test the endurance
of each method. Fig. 7 shows the results in which the 1 degree
performance threshold has been marked and the RMS error of
each technique has been plotted against the gyroscope noise
power. It can be seen that all methods give sub-degree accuracy
when the sensor quality is good but the error starts to increase
as soon as the quality is decreased.
Increasing gyroscope noise power not only corrupts nor-
mal attitude estimate but also causes problem with the way
each technique deals with external acceleration. The proposed
method can be seen to be performing much better than all
the other techniques. The reason being that external accelera-
tions are handled most effectively and thus decreasing sensor
quality has little effect on it. This verifies that the proposed
method enables the use of low cost MEMS IMU in vehicular
applications for the first time.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
Fig. 8. Yaw angle estimate.
G. Significance
To signify the importance of the proposed work, we show
the performance improvements delivered by the proposed
method in two important vehicular applications as compared
to existing methods.
1) Yaw Angle Estimation Accuracy: The yaw angle of a
vehicle is typically measured using a magnetometer which
is a tri-axial device that measures the magnetic forces acting
upon its axes. The Earth exerts a magnetic force towards the
North pole hence the yaw angle can be calculated from the
modulation of this force on the magnetometer axes.
If the magnetometer measurements are given by
yM = m + nM (53)
we can calculate the yaw angle ψ using
y M,y
ψ = atan (54)
y M,x
However due to a change in the pitch or roll angle of
the vehicle, the orientation of this magnetic field vector on
the magnetometer axes changes. For instance a car traveling
straight on a road undergoing a change in its pitch will
also give a change in its yaw angle. To avoid this, the
magnetometer’s orientation needs to be compensated w.r.t the
vehicle’s pitch and roll angles using [49]
y M,z .si nφ − y M,y .cosφ
ψ = atan
y M,x .cosθ + y M,y .si nθ.si nφ + y M,z .si nθ.cosφ
(55)
Accurate estimation of the pitch and roll angles are necessary
in order to obtain an accurate yaw angle from a magnetometer.
Any error in the attitude will automatically induce an error in
the yaw estimate. We estimated the yaw angle obtained by
performing pitch and roll compensation using the proposed
filter and compared it with Methods 1 and 5. The results are
shown in Fig. 8. We calculated MSE of yaw angle using the
pitch and roll estimated from five reference methods and the
proposed methods. The results are shown in Table V.
It is quite evident that the proposed method gives
ten-folds better performance in yaw estimate than the
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AHMED AND TAHIR: ACCURATE ATTITUDE ESTIMATION OF A MOVING LAND VEHICLE 13

TABLE V
RMS E RROR OF YAW E STIMATE

TABLE VI
E RROR OF L OCATION BY D EAD R ECKONING

Fig. 9. Comparison of divergence of location error estimates by dead

reckoning.

previous techniques. This is only because of accurate attitude

angles are available to completely compensate the magnetome-
ter orientation.
2) Dead Reckoning: In dead reckoning, the position of the
vehicle is calculated by advancing an initially known position
in time using the estimated speed and pose of the vehicle.
Because the speed is estimated by integration of the noisy
accelerometer measurements and drifts away after some time,
such systems are able to maintain accuracy over only very
small periods of time and are mostly used to augment GPS sys-
tems to maintain localization during GPS signal outages. The
proposed filter is able to completely separate the gravitational
and linear acceleration components from the accelerometer Fig. 10. Experimental testbed. (a) Instrumented vehicle. (b) MEMS IMU in
the boot. (c) Reference GPS assisted IMU on roof.
measurements hence it gives the most accurate estimate of the
vehicle’s acceleration which is integrated to obtain the speed,
A. Experimental Setup
and we have already shown that the heading estimate obtained
through the proposed method is also the most accurate. Dead MEMS IMU from STMicroelectronics consisting of a
reckoning is performed using the following equations. tri-axial accelerometer (LSM303DHLC) and tri-axial gyro-
scope (L3GD20) were used for experiments. They were
ẋ cos(ψ)
= .v (56) mounted in the boot of a test vehicle (Fig. 10a, 10b) on
ẏ si n(ψ) a rubber damper platform to decrease the vibrational and
Therefore the dead reckoning system formed using the pro- noise effects. Data was logged at 150 Hz and processed offline.
posed method is able to maintain location accuracy for a In order to obtain the actual pitch and roll measurements
much longer time as compared to other techniques. To test for comparison, a high accuracy GPS assisted IMU from
this aspect, we set an error threshold of 1 meter and observed Advanced Navigation Technologies was used which has a
the divergence of location error estimates of all methods. The maximum attitude error of 0.1° even under high dynamic
results are depicted in Fig. 9. The proposed method is able to conditions. The GPS assisted IMU was mounted on the roof
keep an accurate estimate up to 500m while the other methods of the vehicle as shown in Fig. 10c. The algorithm was
hardly crossed 50m. The RMS location error after driving implemented by using the same noise variance values as
800 meters is presented in Table VI. mentioned in Section IV-A.

V. E XPERIMENTS
The performance improvement obtained using the proposed
method has been experimentally verified by collecting data
from an instrumented vehicle during some test drives. In this
section, we present the results obtained from experiments.
B. Experiment A
For the first experiment, the car was driven over a straight
road containing a speed breaker. Thus this test involved
changes in pitch while the sensor experienced longitudinal
accelerations. The speed breaker introduces a sine-wave like
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14 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

Fig. 11. Estimation results of experiment A. (a) Pitch estimate. (b) Roll estimate. (c) x-axis acceleration estimate. (d) Yaw estimate.

Fig. 12. Fly-over test track for Experiment B.
pattern in the pitch response of the vehicle. The vehicle
was accelerating during 0-3s & 15-18s and braking during
19-23s. The results of pitch and roll angle estimates during
this drive are shown in Figs. 11a-11b. The pitch estimate from
Method 1 is unaffected by external accelerations however it
drifts away with time. Methods 2-5 are affected by external
accelerations. The proposed method is immune to both exter-
nal accelerations and drift problems. For the roll estimate,
since the vehicle was driven over a straight road and no lateral
external accelerations were experienced, none of the methods
suffer from external acceleration problem. However, since the
vehicle is moving, reference methods rely more on gyroscope
measurements and hence suffer from the drift problem. The
proposed method is still accurate and provides the correct roll
estimate. Fig. 11c shows the estimation of longitudinal/x-axis
acceleration. Owing to the accurate estimation of pitch angle,
the proposed method provides accurate x-axis acceleration
estimation as well whereas the other methods show poor
performance. Yaw estimation accuracy, as discussed before,
also depends upon the accuracy of pitch and roll estimation
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AHMED AND TAHIR: ACCURATE ATTITUDE ESTIMATION OF A MOVING LAND VEHICLE 15

Fig. 13. Estimation results for experiment B. (a) Pitch estimate. (b) Roll estimate. (c) x-axis acceleration estimate. (d) Yaw estimate.

which is evident from Fig. 11d, where it has been shown for shown in Figs. 13a-13b. We observe again that Method 1 drifts
that portion where performance difference is significant. whereas Methods 2-5 give poor performance in the presence of
acceleration however the proposed method provides accurate
C. Experiment B estimates.

In the second test, the car was driven over a fly-over to
introduce changes in pitch and lane changes were performed
at the same time to produce simultaneous longitudinal and
lateral accelerations during changes in pitch. The test track is
shown in Fig. 12. The results of x-axis acceleration estimate
and yaw angle estimation are also shown in Figs. 13c-13e
indicating the superiority of the proposed method over the
reference methods. The pitch and roll estimation results are
VI. C ONCLUSION
The problem of estimating the attitude of a moving vehicle
using only low cost MEMS IMU sensors have been con-
sidered in this paper. We proposed a novel Kalman filter to
estimate the attitude of the vehicle under dynamic conditions
by applying the measurement updates in two steps. Extensive
simulations and real driving tests were performed to study the
performance of the filter under various dynamic conditions.
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16
Some reference methods from the literature were considered
for performance comparison. The proposed method showed
enhanced performance under different dynamic conditions
in terms of accuracy of both attitude estimation and exter-
nal acceleration estimation. The robustness of the proposed
method against deteriorating sensor quality was also tested
and it was verified that the proposed method maintains good
performance even with the lowest quality sensors. In this
way, the proposed method has enabled the use of very low
cost MEMS IMU sensors for vehicle attitude estimation for
challenging automotive applications.
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 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.

AHMED AND TAHIR: ACCURATE ATTITUDE ESTIMATION OF A MOVING LAND VEHICLE 17

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Muhammad Tahir (M’15) received the M.S. and
Ph.D. degrees in electronics and communication
engineering from Politecnico di Torino in 2009
and 2013, respectively. In 2013, he was a Research
Associate with the Navigation Signal Analysis and
Simulation Group, ISMB. In 2014, he joined the
Lahore University of Management Sciences as an
Assistant Professor with the Electrical Engineering
Department. His primary research areas of interest
include statistical signal processing, estimation and
detection theory, and non-linear Bayesian filtering
with applications to wireless positioning, navigation, and communications.

Hamad Ahmed (M’15) received the B.Sc. degree in

electrical engineering from University of Engineer-
ing and Technology, Lahore, in 2015, with majors
in telecommunication and electronics engineering.
He is a Research Assistant with the Signal Process-
ing and Navigation Algorithms Group, Department
of Electrical Engineering, Lahore University of Man-
agement Sciences, where he is involved with the
development of low-cost alternatives to GPS for
vehicle localization. His research interests lie in
the areas of statistical signal processing, optimal
estimation theory, wireless localization techniques, and machine learning.