Rocket trajectory estimation using onboard IMU (position and attitude)

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Wyatt

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Hey everyone,

Recently made this video demonstrating how I estimate the trajectory of my rockets using a flight computer I made:



I find that deriving this kind of estimate is (a) kind of neat and (b) helps with analysis of a rocket's flight (e.g. how stable was the rocket, how fast did it roll, etc.).

I'm not aware of any commercial flight computers that provide this kind of data. Is anyone interested in either tutorials on how to do this, or a commercially available flight computer that could do this?
 
Recently made this video demonstrating how I estimate the trajectory of my rockets using a flight computer I made:

Very nice! This is something I have been wanting to put together for years now but have not had the time. I was planning to use Visual Python to display the orientation of the rocket from the quaternion flight data. I am curious what you used?
 
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Very nice! This is something I have been wanting to put together for years now but have not had the time. I was planning to use Visual Python to display the orientation of the rocket from the quaternion flight data. I am curious what you used?

Thanks! I used MATLAB for this. MATLAB is a very convenient environment to do all the linear algebra to derive the trajectory estimate, not as convenient to make the animation, though I've got a pretty good handle of how to do it now. It's also fairly limited in terms of making high resolution animations.

When I do this again I'll definitely consider different options for generating the animation, likely python-based.
 
Hey everyone,

Recently made this video demonstrating how I estimate the trajectory of my rockets using a flight computer I made:



I find that deriving this kind of estimate is (a) kind of neat and (b) helps with analysis of a rocket's flight (e.g. how stable was the rocket, how fast did it roll, etc.).

I'm not aware of any commercial flight computers that provide this kind of data. Is anyone interested in either tutorials on how to do this, or a commercially available flight computer that could do this?

This looks amazing! I doubt you will see this (being several months after you posted), but I would be very appreciative of a tutorial on how to obtain an orientation estimate from a gyro. I saw your Reddit response to a question relating to this, but I can't make much sense of the 93 page article you linked. I am not exactly fluent in maths, and I am still getting to grips with linear algebra and quaternions.

I have launched a TVC rocket that simply integrated the angular rate, which somehow worked (just about), but I would love to be able to get a proper orientation estimate.
 
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