A Rao-Blackwellized particle filter has been designed and its performance investigated in a simulated three-axis satellite testbed used for evaluating on-board attitude estimation and control algorithms. Vector measurements have been used to estimate attitude and angular rate and, additionally, a pseudo-measurement based on a low-pass filtered time-derivative of the vector measurements has been proposed to improve the filter performance. Conventional extended and unscented Kalman filters, and standard particle filtering have been compared with the proposed approach to gauge its performance regarding attitude and angular rate estimation accuracy, computational workload, convergence rate under uncertain initial conditions, and sensitivity to disturbances. Though a myriad of filters have been proposed in the past to tackle the problem of spacecraft attitude and angular rate estimation with vector observations, to the best knowledge of the authors the present Rao-Blackwellized particle filter is a novel approach that significantly reduces the computational load, provides an attractive convergence rate, and successfully preserves the performance of the standard particle filter when subjected to disturbances.
Rao-Blackwellized particle filter with vector observations for satellite three-axis attitude estimation and control in a simulated testbed
