ADVANCED SATELLITE ATTITUDE DETERMINATION APPROACH WITH GYROSCOPE BIAS ESTIMATION

Abstract

Micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) based gyroscopes are commonly used for satellite’s attitude determination and control system (ADCS) in recent years. They provide a low-cost solution to the emerging NewSpace industry. MEMS gyroscopes exhibit time-zero null bias with variation over temperature. To overcome this problem, this thesis proposes two new approaches for satellite attitude determination with gyroscope bias estimation based on a Reduced Order Extended Kalman Filter (ROEKF) and a QUatertion-ESTimator (QUEST) working alongside an estimator based on the model predictive control (MPC) approach. The proposed methods can estimate the gyroscope’s bias instantly and it is robust against changes in temperature. In addition, the computational requirement of QUEST-MPC estimator was found to be the lowest, demanding only 1.6% of the typical EKF method. The thesis also presents an in-house developed spacecraft simulator and experimental results conducted using the spacecraft simulator to verify the performance of the proposed methods.