New Feature: Extended Kalman Filter State Estimator for SimpleFlight

[subedisuman]

Fixes: #

About

In the following branch, I have implemented an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) based state estimator. It was motivated by a feature request comming from AirSim to have an EKF based state estimator in the SimpleFlight firmware. The contribution in this pull request uses the following sensor measurements: IMU, GPS, Barometer, and Magnetometer to estimate the following states: local (NED) x-y-z positions, x-y-z velocities, attitudes, and IMU and barometer sensor biases.

How Has This Been Tested?

• Verified that in absence of sensor noises and following the same integration scheme as used in FastPhysicsEngine, the ground truth states can be replicated by the EKF estimated states.
• Ran multiple flight maneuvers and plotted the estimated states against the true states with sufficient accuracy.

Screenshots (if appropriate):

Please follow this issue for more details.
The updates can be found in the issue. There is also a demo to try things out and see results in plots :). Please contact me for questions, assistance, or feature requests either in the issue or here. Thank you.

[xxEoD2242]

Hey @subedisuman, AirSim is being archived and no new features are being added.

I have built a fork and we are actively integrating new features into the system here:Colosseum. Feel free to make a PR there if you like or I can pull this one through your branch directly.