Abstract:

Due to the double spreadability of the quaternion for attitude representation or the non-one-to-one-mapping between the attitude and the quaternion, an attitude distraction issue may occur. A method for representing the compressed full-attitude quaternion is proposed in this paper to solve the issue mentioned above. First, two concepts of compressed attitude-space and compressed quaternion-space are introduced, and then the one-to-one mapping relationship between them is derived based on the East-North-Day coordinate system. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by numerical simulation experiments. The simulation results show that the proposed method not only inherits the non-singularity advantages of the quaternion for attitude representation, but also avoids the problem of attitude distraction caused by double spreadability.

Key words: attitude angle, attitude representation, attitude computation, quaternion, singularity