> Instead of the usual Kalman filtering, I've devised my own IMU sensor fusion algorithm which is super easy to visualize and doesn't require a PHD in mathematics. Further, it works as well as the complex filters you'd find in the conventional approach.
I wonder what evidence he has for that. It sounds awfully suspect.
In the few cases I've come across where people have claimed this, the stuff behind the curtain has usually turned out to be a muddled simplification of the original made possible by additional constraints.
Think Kirchhoff's circuit laws vs Faraday's law but with less math and more crackpottery.
Which worsens its image further--"I've got an amazing new method better than the scientists could come up with, but it's secret!" smells of incompetence at best.
Lay off the guy. The fact is that the Kalman filter applies to a very small (arguably non-existent in the real world) set of estimation problems, and the solutions that even the PhDs come up with are typically ad hoc and suboptimal.
That being said, there's really not much to his solution - he's relying on gravity (from accelerometer) and magnetometer data to provide most of the orientation information. The IMU really isn't doing much, and I can't see how this works well during maneuvers.
EDIT: Note that's the _actual_ Kalman filter. Most of the time when people say KF, they really mean Extended Kalman Filter, which is an approximation to the real thing. Optimality goes out the window when you approximate.
He's a 3D game engine programmer (the tech cofounder at High Impact Games, an offshoot of Insomnia games - he worked on Ratchet and Clank). He's probably not too bad at 3D programming.
He's not claiming anything big. Just that it works as well as conventional filters (and he might just mean "works well enough").
Sure, he's probably doing something goofy, but it is demonstrably good enough for a toy UAV. Also, I don't think he's claiming a general solution, just something that works for his problem.
I wonder what evidence he has for that. It sounds awfully suspect.