Digital system for aircraft attitude measurement

Abstract EN

Aircraft convention defines the attitude parameters in terms of three angles: roll, pitch and heading.

These angles are referenced to the local horizontal plane defined by gravity vector.

Attitude information for aircraft is obtained by using spinning rotor or ring laser gyroscopes.

These systems are very precise but they suffer from many problems such as high cost, large size and weight and the requirements for elaborate and intricate mechanical structure.

These problems can be reduced by the exploitation of the micro machined technology.

In this work, an attitude measuring system based on the ADXL202 accelerometer, the HMC2003 magnetic sensor and the ADuC812 microcontroller has been designed and implemented.

An algorithm for decoding of the ADXL202 output signals is described and implemented as software programs written in C-language to perform and display the attitude measurements and a correction method for the errors introduced by tilt angles is described.

The measuring system operation is examined by the test of the reading’s repeatability and constancy.

A good repeatability and constancy with a high degree of precision and small amounts of error and dispersion are found from these tests.