Gradual fault detection is always an important issue in integrated navigation systems, and the gradual fault is the most difficult fault to detect. To detect gradual faults in a timely and precise manner in integrated navigation systems, the statistical concepts of the normalised residual mean and the sum of absolute residuals are introduced according to the characteristics of gradual system failure in this paper. The applicability of the improved residual χ 2 detection method is discussed. Then, the gradual fault detection program based on the improved residual χ 2 detection method is designed with the criterion of normalised residual mean and the sum of absolute residual. The simulation results and vehicle tests show that: 1) The residual of the failed sub-system can be calculated accurately with the improved residual χ 2 detection method, which has strong applicability in gradual fault detection; 2) The gradual fault can be detected in a short time by using the normalised residual mean and the sum of absolute residual.2. χ 2 detection method. 3. Gradual fault detection. 4. Mean of residual.5. Sum of absolute residual.

To realize the application of the star sensor in the all-day carrier platform, a three-field-of-view (three-FOV) star sensor in short-wave infrared (SWIR) band is considered. This new prototype employs new techniques that can improve the detection capability of the star sensor, when the huge size of star identification feature database becomes a big obstacle. Hence, a way to thin the guide star catalog for three-FOV daytime star sensor is studied. Firstly, an introduction of three-FOV star sensor and an example of three-FOV daytime star sensor with narrow FOV are presented. According to this model and the requirement of triangular star identification method, two constraints based on the number and the brightness of the stars in FOV are put forward for guide star selection. Then on the basis of these constraints, the improved spherical spiral method (ISSM) is proposed and the optimal number of reference points of ISSM is discussed. Finally, to demonstrate the performance of the ISSM, guide star catalogs are generated by ISSM, magnitude filter method (MFM), 1st order self-organizing guide star selection method (1st-SOPM) and the spherical spiral method (SSM), respectively. The results show that the guide star catalog generated by ISSM has the smallest size and the number and brightness characteristics of its guide stars are better than the other methods. ISSM is effective for the guide star selection in the three-FOV daytime star sensor.

The navigation accuracy of a star sensor depends on the estimation accuracy of its optical parameters, and so, the parameters should be updated in real time to obtain the best performance. Current on-orbit calibration methods for star sensors mainly rely on the angular distance between stars, and few studies have been devoted to seeking new calibration references. In this paper, an on-orbit calibration method using singular values as the calibration reference is introduced and studied. Firstly, the camera model of the star sensor is presented. Then, on the basis of the invariance of the singular values under coordinate transformation, an on-orbit calibration method based on the singular-value decomposition (SVD) method is proposed. By means of observability analysis, an optimal model of the star combinations for calibration is explored. According to the physical interpretation of the singular-value decomposition of the star vector matrix, the singular-value selection for calibration is discussed. Finally, to demonstrate the performance of the SVD method, simulation calibrations are conducted by both the SVD method and the conventional angular distance-based method. The results show that the accuracy and convergence speed of both methods are similar; however, the computational cost of the SVD method is heavily reduced. Furthermore, a field experiment is conducted to verify the feasibility of the SVD method. Therefore, the SVD method performs well in the calibration of star sensors, and in particular, it is suitable for star sensors with limited computing resources.

Star sensor needs real-time calibration to improve its navigation accuracy. Compared with other parameters, the position of the principal point is more easily affected by the measurement error, which leads to low calibration accuracy. Conventional star sensors on-orbit calibration methods mainly rely on the angular distance(AD) between stars. The observability of the principal point in this method and the calibration accuracy is not as well as that of other parameters. In this paper, an on-orbit calibration method of star sensor based on the angular distance subtraction(ADS) is proposed. The accuracy of the on-orbit calibration is improved by increasing the observability of the principal point in the calibration process, and the feasibility of this method is verified by the observability analysis. Finally, improved angular distance subtraction(IADS) models are proposed to solve the time-consuming problem of ADS method. In order to demonstrate the performance of the IADS models, simulation calibrations are conducted. The results show that the accuracy of u0 and v0 of the IADS method is 62.7% and 15.9% higher than that of AD method when other parameters are set as nominal values. The calibration accuracy of the principal point is improved effectively.

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