Windowed Quaternion Estimator For Gyroless Spacecraft Attitude Determination

Single point attitude determination method provides an optimal attitude minimizing the Wahba loss function. However, for the insufficient number of measurement vectors, the conventional single point methods has no unique solution. Thus, we introduce the sequential method to and an optimal attitude minimizing the windowed loss function. In this paper, this function is de ned as the sum of square errors for all measurement vectors within the axed sliding window. For simple implementation, the proposed algorithm is rewritten as a recursive form. Moreover, the covariance matrix is derived and expressed as a recursive form. Finally, we apply this algorithm to the attitude determination system with three LOS measurement sensors.