Decentralized Estimation of Spacecraft Relative Motion Using Consensus Extended Kalman Filter

摘要

In this paper, the decentralized estimation strategy of multiple spacecraft cooperatively estimating their relative orbits is proposed by utilizing the technique of consensus extended Kalman filtering. The benefits of using the decentralized estimation strategy on system observability are illustrated. A series of numerical results verify that the decentralized estimation strategy can improve the filtering performance and resist the tendency of the filters to converge on ambiguous relative orbits. The diffusion of observability between different estimation loops in the decentralized estimation network is also proposed and studied by numerical examples.