A Portable Support Attitude Sensing System for Accurate Attitude Estimation of Hydraulic Support Based on Unscented Kalman Filter

To measure the support attitude of hydraulic support, a support attitude sensing system composed of an inertial measurement unit with microelectromechanical system (MEMS) was designed in this study. Yaw angle estimation with magnetometers is disturbed by the perturbed magnetic field generated by coal rock structure and high-power equipment of shearer in automatic coal mining working face. Roll and pitch angles are estimated using the MEMS gyroscope and accelerometer, and the accuracy is not reliable with time. In order to eliminate the measurement error of the sensors and obtain the high-accuracy attitude estimation of the system, an unscented Kalman filter based on quaternion according to the characteristics of complementation of the magnetometer, accelerometer and gyroscope is applied to optimize the solution of sensor data. Then the gradient descent algorithm is used to optimize the key parameter of unscented Kalman filter, namely process noise covariance, to improve the accuracy of attitude calculation. Finally, an experiment and industrial application show that the average measurement error of yaw angle is less than 2° and that of pitch angle and roll angle is less than 1°, which proves the efficiency and feasibility of the proposed system and method.