Adaptive fault-tolerant multiplicative attitude filtering for small satellites

Abstract

This study tackles the problem of fault-tolerant attitude estimation for small satellites. A probabilistic adaptive technique is presented for the multiplicative extended Kalman filter (MEKF) algorithm that is used in attitude estimation. The presented method is based on tracking the normalized measurement innovations in the filter and calculating the probability of the normal operation of the estimation system. Using this probability, the filter gain is corrected to maintain the tracking performance of the filter despite faulty measurements. In order to evaluate the performance of this method, several simulations are performed where different types of faults are introduced to the synthetic attitude sensor measurements (magnetometer and sun sensor) at different times. Simulation results are compared not only with a conventional EKF but also with another popular adaptive Kalman filter, an adaptive Kalman filter with multiple scaling factors (MSFs).