Unscented Schmidt-Kalman filter on Lie groups with application to spacecraft attitude estimation

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This paper addresses the estimation problem of nonlinear systems evolving on Lie groups with unknown parameters. More precisely, some parameters in the equations of motion or sensor measurements are unknown, such as gravitational anomalies and measurement biases, and are infeasible to estimate with available observations. The unscented Schmidt-Kalman filter (USKF) approach in Euclidean space is incorporated with exponential maps from Lie algebra to Lie groups, to develop USKF algorithms on Lie groups. Two types of USKFs are derived, respectively, from left-invariant and right-invariant state estimation errors. The two USKFs, not only account for the effect of unknown parameters but also provide estimates preserving the geometry of state manifold. They are advantageous over the extended Schmidt-Kalman filter for nonlinear systems in the sense of avoiding the computation of Jacobian and achieving higher or comparable estimation accuracy depending on the magnitude of parameters uncertainties. The proposed method is then applied to a spacecraft attitude estimation problem based on quaternion representation, where the magnitude of the gyroscope bias noise is unknown. Simulations are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in comparison with other methods.