Gain-scheduled extended kalman filter for nanosatellite attitude determination system

Abstract

The extended Kalman filter (EKF) has been widely used for attitude determination in various satellite missions. However, it requires an extensive computational power that is not suitable for nanosatellite application. This paper proposes a gain-scheduled EKF (GSEKF) to reduce the computational requirement in the nanosatellite attitude determination process. The proposed GSEKF eliminates the online recursive Kalman gain computation by analytically determining the Kalman gain based on the sensor parameters, such as the gyroscope noise variance, the quaternion variance, the observation matrix, and the satellite rotational speed. Two GSEKF Kalman gains for two satellite operating modes are presented: the Sun-pointing and nadir-pointing modes. The simulation and experimental results show that the proposed method has comparable attitude estimation accuracy to the conventional EKF. In addition, the proposed GSEKF reduces 86.29% and 89.45% of the computation load compared with the multiplicative EKF and Murrell's version.

Optimized Design and Thermal Analysis of Printed Magnetorquer for Attitude Control of Reconfigurable Nanosatellites

“…Having the estimate of the current attitude, the controller issues torque commands for desired orientation [9], [21], [22]. The closed loop feedback ensures the maintenance of desired attitude control by repeating the torque command until the desired orientation is achieved [23], [24], [25], [26].…”

Adaptive Control of Satellite System using Kalman Estimates in the presence of Disturbance

“…The problem due to the atmospheric distractions or swings were modeled in (3)(4)(5). Above equations were evolved virtually in MATLAB with a 3-dimensional Ito-stochastic differential equation.…”

“…The requirements of attitude determination, finite-time attitude tracking in space missions for the conditions where exogenous disturbances and inertia uncertainties degrade the performance was addressed. Such issues were visited by [5,6] with the strategy of extended kalman with gain scheduled in nano-satellite for determining attitude and a novel adaptive sliding mode control for robustness, faster response and high precision control was implemented.…”

Dot Product Equality Constrained Attitude Determination from Two Vector Observations: Theory and Astronautical Applications

“…Commonly, the vector observations are acquired from vector-measurement sensors e.g., Sun sensor, Nadir sensor, magnetometer, star tracker, etc. [4][5][6]. The usage of direct attitude determination from such sensors has the advantage of compensating for biases in rate gyroscopes to cancel the long-endurance drifts inside inertial navigation results [7,8].…”