Conservative Term Constrained Kalman Filter for Autonomous Orbit Determination

Abstract

This paper presents a novel constrained Kalman filter framework for autonomous orbit determination. By using Lagrangian multiplier techniques, the conserved terms of orbit motion are incorporated into the estimation routines to reconstruct the Kalman filter, and then the orthogonal and multipartial-norm-constrained Kalman filters are developed for the satellite in circular orbit and eccentric ones, respectively. Finally, scenarios of both circular and eccentric orbits with unknown measurement bias are simulated by using the proposed constrained Kalman filter; the simulation results show that the estimation accuracy is significantly improved after introducing the conservative terms as constraint.