A solution for the attitude determination of three-vehicle heterogeneous formations

Abstract

This paper proposes a solution to a new attitude determination problem for a three-vehicle formation, where there are restrictions on the detection of other vehicles. Vision-based sensors are considered, which measure line-of-sight (LOS) vectors between different vehicles and inertial vectors that can vary according to the vehicle. There is a constraint on the LOS vectors which are only measured in relation to a chief vehicle. Moreover, each vehicle can measure only one inertial vector. The solution for the different attitude relations is devised geometrically, making use of a multi-stage process. First, two candidates for the relative attitude of each branch are determined. Then, these relative attitude candidates are used to compute inertial attitude candidates for the chief vehicle. The comparison between these results disambiguates the problem, which in general has a unique solution. There are some degenerate solutions, which are also determined. Finally, simulations are carried out considering noise in the sensors. The results are coherent with state-of-the-art approaches to similar problems.