A Novel Filtering Mechanism to Improve the Performance of GPS/MEMS Gyro Attitude Determination for NEO Satellite

Fuxiang Cao, Kay Soon Low, Keck Voon Ling, Eng Kee Poh, Chin Siong Lim, Guo Xiong Lee, Yung Fu Tsai

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	GPS and 3-axis MEMS (Microelectromechanical systems) Gyro integrated attitude determination system for Near Equatorial Orbit (NEO) earth pointing satellite with very short baseline (26.7 cm) is studied in detail in this paper. Once being launched into its orbit, the satellite will be moving/ rotating continuously day and night in its manyyears lifespan, some common used static calibration methods, such as in-house static calibration, zero velocity updating or simply averaging during a static period which are used for relatively short period land, air and sea applications, are not suitable for space application. As the bias of MEMS gyros are much bigger than high accuracy gyros such as FOG, RLG etc., the attitude output from GPS/MEMS gyro integrated attitude determination system using common Kalman Filter (KF) estimation is severely biased. A novel filtering mechanism which includes two cascaded KFs is proposed in this paper to reduce the bias of attitude output from common KF estimation. Besides the common used KF, we call it the 1st KF, the 2nd KF is used to further process the biased attitude output from 1st KF and GPS based attitude. The interesting processing results show that this filtering mechanism can reduce the attitude bias of the usual KF estimation conspicuously, i.e., if GPS based attitude is available, the attitude output from GPS and MEMS gyro integrated system using the above filtering mechanism is roughly comparable with that from GPS and FOG gyro integrated system with 1 KF estimation; if GPS based attitude is not available because of integer ambiguity failure, the attitude integrated from gyro measurements can bridge the gap of GPS attitude interruption, with reduced attitude accuracy. This novel filtering mechanism is a potential way to improve the performance of GPS (GNSS) and low cost MEMS gyro integrated attitude determination system for very short baseline platform such as NEO micro satellite or mini UAV.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 28th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2015) September 14 - 18, 2015 Tampa Convention Center Tampa, Florida
Pages:	2007 - 2012
Cite this article:	Cao, Fuxiang, Low, Kay Soon, Ling, Keck Voon, Poh, Eng Kee, Lim, Chin Siong, Lee, Guo Xiong, Tsai, Yung Fu, "A Novel Filtering Mechanism to Improve the Performance of GPS/MEMS Gyro Attitude Determination for NEO Satellite," Proceedings of the 28th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2015), Tampa, Florida, September 2015, pp. 2007-2012.
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