This paper deals with the attitude estimation of a rigid body equipped with angular velocity sensors and reference vector sensors. A quaternion-based nonlinear observer is proposed in order to fuse all information sources and to obtain an accurate estimation of the attitude. It is shown that the observer error dynamics can be separated into two passive subsystems connected in "feedback". Then, ...

This paper investigates the problem of relative spacecraft attitude estimation between three vehicles from a decentralized point of view. Decentralized attitude estimation is achieved through the use of local extended Kalman filters and a data fusion process known as the Covariance Intersection algorithm. Because the global attitude parameterization is the quaternion, the Covariance Intersectio...

In normal working conditions it is possible to achieve sufficient attitude estimation accuracy for a satellite using regular Kalman filter algorithm. On the other hand, when there is a fault in the measurements, the Kalman filter fails in providing the required accuracy and may even collapse over time. In this paper, a Robust Kalman filtering method is proposed for the attitude estimation probl...

Compelling evidence has been given for the high energy efficiency and update rates of neuromorphic processors, with performance beyond what standard Von Neumann architectures can achieve. Such promising features could be advantageous in critical embedded systems, especially robotics. To date, constraints inherent robots (e.g., size weight, battery autonomy, available sensors, computing resource...

In this paper, a novel algorithm to know the pose of any autonomous vehicle is described. Such a system (Attitude and Heading Reference System, AHRS) is essential for real time vehicle navigation, guidance and control applications. For low funded projects, with simple sensors, efficient and robust algorithms become necessary for an acceptable performance, and the well-known extended Kalman filt...

This paper describes a method for estimating the attitude of an underwater robot. The method employs a new concept of sine rotation vector and uses both an attitude heading and reference system (AHRS) and a Doppler velocity log (DVL) for the purpose of measurement. First, the acceleration and magnetic-field measurements are transformed into sine rotation vectors and combined. The combined sine ...

The observability of space object attitude from light curve data is analyzed. Light curves, which are the time-varying apparent brightness of sunlight reflected off a space object and measured by an observer, depend on the object position, attitude, surface material, shape, and other parameters. Previous work employing light curve data for shape estimation requires the availability of good atti...

A new spacecraft attitude estimation approach using particle filtering is derived. Based on sequential Monte Carlo simulation, the particle filter approximately represents the probability distribution of the state vector with random samples. The filter formulation is based on the star camera measurements using a gyro-based or attitude dynamics-based model for attitude propagation. Modified Rodr...

The maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for a vehicle’s attitude using signals received from GPS satellites is derived in this paper. A statistical model of the measured phase double-differences is developed to form the likelihood function. The attitude is represented by a rotation matrix, a member of the group of 3×3 special orthogonal matrices. A steepest descent-like maximization algorithm is...