In the process of the attitude measurement for a steering drilling system, the measurement of the attitude parameters may be uncertain and unpredictable due to the influence of server vibration on bits. In order to eliminate the interference caused by vibration on the measurement and quickly obtain the accurate attitude parameters of the steering drilling tool, a new method for multi-sensor dynamic attitude combined measurement is presented. Firstly, by using a triaxial accelerometer and triaxial magnetometer measurement system, the nonlinear model based on the quaternion is established. Then, an improved adaptive fading square root unscented Kalman filter is proposed for eliminating the vibration disturbance signal. In this algorithm, the square root of the state covariance matrix is used to replace the covariance matrix in the classical unscented Kalman filter (UKF) to avoid the filter divergence caused by the negative definite state covariance matrix. The fading factor is introduced into UKF to adjust the filter gain in real-time and improve the adaptive ability of the algorithm to mutation state. Finally, the computational method of the fading factor is optimized to ensure the self-adaptability of the algorithm and reduce the computational complexity. The results of the laboratory test and the field-drilling data show that the proposed method can filter out the interference noise in the attitude measurement sensor effectively, improve the solution accuracy of attitude parameters of drilling tools in the case of abrupt changes in the measuring environment, and thus ensuring the dynamic stability of the well trajectory.

In the process of drilling, severe downhole vibration causes attitude measurement sensors to be erroneous; the errors will accumulate gradually during the inclination calculation. As a result, the ultimate well path could deviate away from the planned trajectory. In order to solve this problem, this paper utilized the stochastic resonance (SR) and chaos phase transition (CPT) produced by the second-order Duffing system to identify the frequency and estimate the parameters of the signal during measurement while drilling. Firstly, the idea of a variable-scale is introduced in order to reconstruct the frequency of the attitude measurement signal, and an SR frequency detection model based on a scale transformation Duffing system is established in order to meet the frequency limit condition of the SR. Then, an attitude measurement signal with a known frequency value is input into the Duffing chaos system, and the scale transformation is used again to make the frequency value meet the parameter requirement of chaos detection. Finally, two Duffing oscillators with different initial phases of their driving signal are combined in order to estimate the amplitude and phase parameters of the measurement signal by using their CPT characteristics. The results of the laboratory test and the field-drilling data demonstrated that the proposed algorithm has good immunity to the interference noise in the attitude measurement sensor, improving the solution accuracy of the inclination in a severe noise environment and thus ensuring the dynamic stability of the well trajectory.