Gyroless attitude control of multibody satellites using an unscented Kalman filter

An unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is being used to perform the Gyroless attitude control of multibody satellites. It also maintain a specific orientation of the satellite with respect to the local-vertical/local-horizontal (LVLH) frame of the body. It is presented basically for the attitude, angular velocity, gimble rates, and gimble angles estimation of the main body of the spacecraft. The partial derivatives that necessary for the linearization approach of the extended Kalman filter (EKF) can be eliminate by using the UKF. The unscented filter uses a set of simple points, like sigma points, to map the probability distribution more accurately than the linearized mapping used by the EKF. It is usually required to to estimate only the inertial attitude and inertial angular velocity of body. Number of computations, which is nearly equivalent to the propagation of half of the sigma points, is required by the UKF when using a first-order Euler integration.

Gyroless attitude control of multibody satellites using an unscented Kalman filter Academic Article