An optimal attitude estimator is presented for a human body-mounted inertial measurement unit employing orthogonal triads of gyroscopes, accelerometers and magnetometers. The estimator continuously fuses gyroscope and accelerometer measurements together in a manner that minimizes the mean square error in the estimate of the gravity vector, based on known spectral characteristics for the gyroscope noise and the linear acceleration of points on the human body. The gyroscope noise is modelled as a white noise process of power spectral density δn2/2 while the linear acceleration is modelled as the derivative of a band-limited white noise process of power spectral density δv2/2. The estimator is robust to centripetal acceleration and guaranteed to have zero mean error regardless of the motion of the sensor. The mean square angular error in attitude is shown to be independent of the module's angular velocity and equal to 21/2g−1/2δn3/2δv1/2.

This paper considers the estimation and filtering of fractional random fields, of which fractional Brownian motion and fractional Riesz-Bessel motion are important special cases. A least-squares solution to the problem is derived by using the duality theory and covariance factorisation of fractional generalised random fields. The minimum fractional duality order of the information random field leads to the most general class of solutions corresponding to the largest function space where the output random field can be approximated. The second-order properties that define the class of random fields for which the least-squares linear estimation problem is solved in a weak-sense are also investigated in terms of the covariance spectrum of the information random field.