Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2021

DOI

10.3390/s21196450

Publication Title

Sensors

Volume

21

Issue

19

Pages

6450 (1-23)

Abstract

Pico- and nano-satellites, due to their form factor and size, are limited in accommodating multiple or redundant attitude sensors. For such satellites, Murrell's implementation of the extended Kalman filter (EKF) can be exploited to accommodate multiple sensor configurations from a set of non redundant attitude sensors. The paper describes such an implementation involving a sun sensor suite and a magnetometer as attitude sensors. The implementation exploits Murrell's EKF to enable three sensor configurations, which can be operationally commanded, for satellite attitude estimation. Among the three attitude estimation schemes, (i) sun sensor suite and magnetometer, (ii) magnetic field vector and its time derivative and (iii) magnetic field vector, it is shown that the third configuration is better suited for attitude estimation in terms of precision and accuracy, but can consume more time to converge than the other two.

Comments

© 2021 by the authors.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Original Publication Citation

Asundi, S., Fitz-Coy, N., & Latchman, H. (2021). Evaluation of Murrell's EKF-based attitude estimation algorithm for exploiting multiple attitude sensor configurations. Sensors 21(19), 1-23, Article 6450. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21196450

ORCID

0000-0003-0989-682X (Asundi)

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