Motor Bourn Magnetic Noise Filtering for Magnetometers in Micro-Rotary Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Avionics systems of micro aerial vehicles (MAV) pose unique problems in system design, sensor signal handling and control. This is evident in micro-rotary aircraft as their whole body rotates with the sensors of the flight control. The precise calculation of attitude and heading from magnetometer readings is complex due to the body rotation. It is made even more difficult by noise induced in the geomagnetic signal by fluctuating magnetic field of the closely positioned motors. Filtering that noise is challenging since the rotation speed of motors and the vehicle can be very close. This paper presents analysis of motor induced noise, based on experimental data of brushless micro motors. A novel time domain filter is proposed, designed, implemented in FPGA hardware, tested and compared to other filters. This filter provides good performance even when the rotational rate of the motor and vehicle are close and traditional frequency domain filters would perform poorly.

Keywords

• Magnetic noise
• Magnetometer
• Rotary body UAV.