Vehicle model-based filtering for spacecraft attitude determination

This thesis investigates the use of vehicle model-based filtering for spacecraft attitude determination. Whereas traditional navigation filters typically rely only on the kinematic relations between body rate and attitude in their filter designs, the state estimator presented here expands the plant model to include rigid body effects and disturbance torques. When rate sensing gyroscope measurement error components are large, as is anticipated in the new generation of micromechanical inertial sensors, the model-based approach provides superior performance to the standard kinematic designs. The estimation performance gains, which include enhanced attitude tracking of several tenths of a degree and closed-loop control stabilization, are most apparent when external attitude data becomes sparse. Even if the gyroscope measurement quality were to improve, for some satellite missions the possibility of an external measurement outage still necessitates vehicle dynamic modeling for greater gyro bias observability. The thesis also gives insight into robustness measures to compensate for model uncertainty, disturbance torque estimation, and GPS multipath error mitigation.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

1998

Author dc:creator

• Dever, Christopher W. (Christopher Walden), 1972-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Rami S. Mangoubi, Roger M. Hain and Zaichun Feng.

• Mechanical Engineering

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/47801

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/47801