This paper provides a survey of modern nonlinear filtering methods for attitude estimation. Early applications relied mostly on the extended Kalman filter for attitude estimation. Since these applications, several new approaches have been developed that have proven to be superior to the extended Kalman filter. Several of these approaches maintain the basic structure of the extended Kalman filte...

This paper introduces three novel methods to evaluate attitude and position from vector observations using a vision-based technology camera. The first approach, called Linear Algebra Resection Approach (LARA), solves for attitude and position simultaneously and can be used in the lost-in-space case, when no approximate solution is available. The solution is shown to be the left eigenvector asso...

The principle of the iterated extended Kalman filter has been generalized to create a new filter that has superior performance when the estimation problem contains severe nonlinearities. The new filter is useful when nonlinearities might significantly degrade the accuracy or convergence reliability of other filters. The new filter solves a nonlinear smoothing problem for the current and past sa...

Measurement of aircraft attitude is a necessary step for the autonomous control of the aircraft. Autonomous aircraft are useful for a range of military and civilian purposes. A method of very low computational complexity is presented that allows the pitch and roll angles of an aircraft to be measured onboard an unmanned aircraft from real-time video of the horizon. This method can be used for m...

A new star pattern recognition method is developed using singular value decomposition of a measured unit column vector matrix in a measurement frame and the corresponding cataloged vector matrix in a reference frame. It is shown that singular values and right singular vectors are invariant with respect to coordinate transformation and robust under uncertainty. One advantage of singular value co...

This paper contains a critical comparison of estimators minimizing Wahba’s loss function. Some new results are presented for the QUaternion ESTimator (QUEST) and EStimators of the Optimal Quaternion (ESOQ and ESOQ-2) to avoid the computational burden of sequential rotations in these algorithms. None of these methods is as robust in principle as Davenport’s q-method or the Singular Value Decompo...