Deterministic Relative Attitude Determination of Three-Vehicle Formations

摘要

This paper proves that deterministic relative attitude determination is possible for a formation of three vehicles.nThe results provide an assessment of the accuracy of the deterministic attitude solutions, given statistical propertiesnof the assumed noisy measurements. Each vehicle is assumed to be equipped with sensors to provide line-of-sight, andnpossibly range, measurements between them. Three vehicles are chosen because this is the minimum numbernrequired to determine all attitudes given minimal measurement information. Three cases are studied. The firstndetermines the absolute (inertial) attitude of a vehicle knowing the absolute positions of the other two. The secondnassumes parallel beams between each vehicle to determine relative attitudes, and the third assumes nonparallelnbeams for relative attitude determination, which requires range information to find deterministic solutions.nCovariance analyses are provided to gain insight on the stochastic properties of the attitude errors and thenobservability for all three cases.