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Observers Design for Inertial Navigation Systems: A Brief Tutorial

The design of navigation observers able to simultaneously estimate the position, linear velocity and orientation of a vehicle in a three-dimensional space is crucial in many robotics and aerospace applications. This problem was mainly dealt with using the extended Kalman filter and its variants which proved to be instrumental in many practical applications. Although practically efficient, the lack of strong stability guarantees of these algorithms motivated the emergence of a new class of geometric navigation observers relying on Riemannian geometry tools, leading to provable strong stability properties. The objective of this brief tutorial is to provide an overview of the existing estimation schemes, as well as some recently developed geometric nonlinear observers, for autonomous navigation systems relying on inertial measurement unit (IMU) and landmark measurements.