The stability of spacecraft attitude is studied with considering sinusoidal disturbance. A passive attitude controller without angular velocity measurement for spacecraft described by quaternion is designed. The passive controller has no information related to system parameters. So it has robustness to model error and uncertainty of model parameters. The stability of spacecraft attitude control...

Obtaining precise attitude information is essential for aircraft navigation and control. This paper presents the results of the attitude determination using an in-house designed low-cost MEMS-based flight information measurement unit. This study proposes a quaternion-based extended Kalman filter to integrate the traditional quaternion and gravitational force decomposition methods for attitude d...

In the field of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) attitude determination, the constraints usually play a critical role in resolving the unknown ambiguities quickly and correctly. Many constraints such as the baseline length, the geometry of multi-baselines and the horizontal attitude angles have been used extensively to improve the performance of ambiguity resolution. In the GNSS/Inerti...

Attitude determination, along with attitude control, is critical to functioning of every space mission. In this paper, we investigate and compare, through simulation, the application of two autonomous sequential attitude estimation algorithms, adopted from the literature, for attitude determination using attitude sensors (sun sensor and horizon sensors) and rate-integrating gyros. The two algor...

Jinwen Liang Tsinghua University State Key Laboratory of Precision Measurement Technology and Instruments Department of Precision Instruments Beijing 100084 China Abstract. We demonstrate theoretically the feasibility of the full-attitude measurement of a moving target by laser tracking systems. Based on the combination of retroreflector target, laser tracking, and interferometry techniques, tw...

The initial attitude estimation of the airborne navigation system greatly affects the overall attitude accuracy. The initial alignment depends on the inertial measurement unit’s performance. In the case of the tactical grade inertial measurement unit, even though tilt angles can be estimated relatively accurately by using accelerometer outputs, it is difficult to determine the azimuth angle wit...

The QUEST measurement noise model for unit vector observations has been widely used in spacecraft attitude estimation for more than twenty years. It was derived under the approximation that the noise lies in the tangent plane of the respective unit vector and is axially symmetrically distributed about the vector. For large field-of-view sensors, however, this approximation may be poor, especial...