Interlaced Attitude Estimation for Spacecraft Using Vector Observations

This paper proposes an interlaced attitude estimation method for spacecraft using vector observations, which can simultaneously estimate the constant attitude at the very start and the attitude of the body frame relative to its initial state. The arbitrary initial attitude, described by constant attitude at the very start, is determined using quaternion estimator which requires no prior information. The multiplicative extended Kalman filter (EKF) is competent for estimating the attitude of the body frame relative to its initial state since the initial value of this attitude is exactly known. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms could achieve better performance compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms even with extreme large initial errors. Meanwhile, the computational burden is also much less than that of the advanced nonlinear attitude estimators.