Adaptive hybrid Kalman filter for attitude motion parameters estimation of space non-cooperative tumbling target

Abstract

Attitude motion parameters estimation of the space non-cooperative tumbling target is the premise of the on-orbit target capture task. However, existing methods cannot balance the estimation accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, an adaptive hybrid Kalman filter is presented to estimate the attitude, angular velocity and inertia motion parameters of the space non-cooperative tumbling target. First, the dynamic model of the non-cooperative tumbling target is derived, and the nonlinear discrete state-space equation is obtained. Then, a hybrid Kalman filter is designed by combining the extended Kalman filter and the unscented Kalman filter. The adaptive technique is introduced to track time-varying uncertain measurement noise caused by complex space disturbances. After that, based on the first-order linearization technique, the sufficient condition for the local convergence of the proposed method is proved. Finally, the numerical simulation experiment was conducted to compare the proposed method with the adaptive extended Kalman filter and the adaptive unscented Kalman filter. The experimental results show that the estimation accuracy of the proposed method is much higher than that of the adaptive extended Kalman filter and slightly lower than that of the adaptive unscented Kalman filter, and the iteration-average Central-Processing-Unit time is 64.2% smaller than that of the adaptive unscented Kalman filter and slightly longer than that of the adaptive extended Kalman filter. The proposed method achieves a much higher accuracy with a slight loss of iteration-average Central-Processing-Unit time.