Design of a Navigation System for Robotic Free Flyers Performing Inspection of Large Space Structures

<p>Inspection of large space structures is imperative for long term mission success. One solution is to utilize a second free flying spacecraft capable of performing inspection in orbit. An Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is used to perform estimations on the relative position, velocity, angular velocity, and attitude through the use of navigation markers. Simulation takes place using MATLAB to compare the true values with the estimated values using the EKF. The initial covariance (P), process noise covariance (Q), and measurement noise covariance (R) matrices were tuned for a space structure with three navigation points. The largest recorded errors over 100 iterations occurred during the initial estimation yielding 26.78 centimeters in relative position, 1.80 centimeters per second in relative velocity, 0.0444 radians per second in relative angular velocity, and a difference of 0.0172 in the unit vector of relative attitude. After allowing 20 seconds of settling time the maximum errors were reduced to 5.0 centimeters in relative position, 0.40 centimeters per second in relative velocity, 0.0046 radians per second in relative angular velocity, and a difference of 0.0020 in the unit vector of relative attitude. The paper also discusses the application of training algorithms to tune the EKF parameters for future consideration.</p>