Autonomous navigation method of satellite constellation based on adaptive forgetting factors

To address the problem that model uncertainty and unknown time-varying system noise hinder the filtering accuracy of the autonomous navigation system of satellite constellation, an autonomous navigation method of satellite constellation based on the Unscented Kalman Filter with Adaptive Forgetting Factors (UKF-AFF) is proposed. The process noise covariance matrix is estimated online with the strategy that combines covariance matching and adaptive adjustment of forgetting factors. The adaptive adjustment coefficient based on squared Mahalanobis distance of state residual is employed to achieve online regulation of forgetting factors, equipping this method with more adaptability. The intersatellite direction vector obtained from photographic observations is introduced to determine the constellation satellite orbit together with the distance measurement to avoid rank deficiency issues. Considering that the number of available measurements varies online with intersatellite visibility in practical applications such as time-varying constellation configurations, the smooth covariance matrix of state correction determined by innovation and gain is adopted and constructed recursively. Stability analysis of the proposed method is also conducted. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the Monte Carlo simulation and comparison experiments. The estimation accuracy of constellation position and velocity of UKF-AFF is improved by 30% and 44% respectively compared to those of the extended Kalman filter, and the method proposed is also better than other several adaptive filtering methods in the presence of significant model uncertainty.