  Stable estimation of rigid body pose and velocities from noisy measurements,
without any knowledge of the dynamics model, is treated using the
Lagrange-d'Alembert principle from variational mechanics. With body-fixed
optical and inertial sensor measurements, a Lagrangian is obtained as the
difference between a kinetic energy-like term that is quadratic in velocity
estimation error and the sum of two artificial potential functions; one
obtained from a generalization of Wahba's function for attitude estimation and
another which is quadratic in the position estimate error. An additional
dissipation term that is linear in the velocity estimation error is introduced,
and the Lagrange-d'Alembert principle is applied to the Lagrangian with this
dissipation. This estimation scheme is discretized using discrete variational
mechanics. The presented pose estimator requires optical measurements of at
least three inertially fixed landmarks or beacons in order to estimate
instantaneous pose. The discrete estimation scheme can also estimate velocities
from such optical measurements. In the presence of bounded measurement noise in
the vector measurements, numerical simulations show that the estimated states
converge to a bounded neighborhood of the actual states.
