In low-cost Attitude Heading Reference Systems (AHRS), the measurements made by Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) type sensors are affected by uncertainties, noises and unknown disturbances. In this paper, considering the robustness of sliding mode observers against structured and unstructured uncertainties, and also exogenous inputs, the process of design and implementation of a sliding mode observer (SMO) is proposed based on a linearized model of the AHRS. To decrease the chattering

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... nomenon is the main difficulty of the SMO. Through smoothing the discontinuity term, the tracking performance of the observer is attenuated. Boundary layer technique, for example, using a saturation term, is the common smoother to remove the chattering drawbacks. However, through poor tracking performance, the high range chattering could not be removed by this method. Therefore, a knowledge-based Mamdani-type fuzzy SMO (FSMO) is proposed to decrease the chattering effects intelligently, which in turn could obtain the high accuracy tracking performance of the SMO. Following proving the stability of the proposed SMOs based on direct Lyapunov's method, the performance of the proposed observers is compared with that of the extended Kalman filter through simulation and real experiments of an AHRS.