Fault-tolerant pose and inertial parameters estimation of an uncooperative spacecraft based on dual vector quaternions

Abstract

Estimating the parameters of an unknown free-floating tumbling spacecraft is an essential task for the on-orbit servicing missions. This paper proposes a dual vector quaternion based fault-tolerant pose and inertial parameters estimation algorithm of an uncooperative space target using two formation flying small satellites. Firstly, by utilizing the dual vector quaternions to model the kinematics and dynamics of the system, not only the representation of the model is concise and compacted, but also the translational and rotational coupled effects are considered. By using this modeling technique along with the measurements from the on-board vision-based sensors, a dual vector quaternion based extended Kalman filter for each of the two small satellites is designed. Secondly, both of the estimations from each small satellite will be used as inputs of the fault-tolerant algorithm. This algorithm is based on the fault-tolerant federal extended Kalman filter strategy to overcome the estimation errors caused by the faulty measurements, the unknown space environment and the computing errors by setting the appropriate ratios of the two estimations from the first step dual vector quaternions extended Kalman filter. Together with the first and second steps, a novel fault-tolerant dual vector quaternions federal extended Kalman filter using two formation flying small satellites is proposed by this paper to estimate the pose and inertial parameters of a free-floating tumbling space target. By utilizing the estimation algorithm, a good prior knowledge of the unknown space target can be achieved. Finally, the proposed dual vector quaternion federal extended Kalman filter is validated by mathematical simulations to show its robust performances.

Attitude-Orbit Coupled Control of Gravitational Wave Detection Spacecraft with Communication Delays

“…However, it is important to consider the strong coupling characteristics between the orbit control and the attitude control. In recent years, the special Euclidean group SE(3) [ 17 , 18 , 19 ] and dual quaternions [ 20 , 21 , 22 ] have been the most popular methods to describe the coupling motion of rigid bodies. A 4 × 4 homogeneous transformation matrix is utilized when modeling rigid bodies on SE(3), while the model is described more compactly by dual quaternions, which have only 8 parameters, and the dual-quaternions multiplications have a lower computational cost than homogeneous transformation matrix multiplications [ 23 ].…”

Impact-Rebound Momentum Excitation Based Inertial Parameters and State Estimation of Defunct Space Object

“…Pesce et al [10] obtained the ratio of the moment of inertia and the relative position of the object. Yuan et al [11,12] proposed a Kalman filter-based algorithm to estimate the ratio of the moments of inertia of defunct objects. Alessia et al [13,14] used the LIDAR-based pose measurements to estimate the moment of inertia ratios of the object.…”

Autonomous relative navigation around uncooperative spacecraft based on a single camera

“…Moreover, tightly-coupled architectures are not robust in case of fast relative dynamics or if the target has complex geometry, since the capability to adequately track features can be compromised. On the other hand, it is important to underline that these approaches are the best option when dealing with uncooperative unknown targets, for which also information on the inertia parameters can be recovered [18,19]. However, for the scenarios of interest to 2 this work, i.e., OOS and ADR, the uncooperative target is a known object.…”