Relative Navigation Algorithm Based on Rodrigues and Spacecraft Orbit & Attitude Information

It is vital to calculate the relative position and pose in many important space missions, such as space formation, rendezvous and docking, space capturing and maintenance etc. It is a direction to get the relative position and pose based on computer vision currently all over the world. And this method is also valid for spacecrafts. In this paper, on the basis of the attitude dynamics of spacecrafts and the theory of computer vision, a relative navigation algorithm based-on Rodrigues and the orbit & attitude information of the spacecrafts is proposed. This algorithm reduces the Jacobian matrix rank. Thus, its calculation speed is faster than the quaternion method. Additionally, the iterative numbers of this algorithm are reduced when the orbit & attitude information of the spacecrafts has been used. So the calculation efficiency of this algorithm is improved. Lastly, some simulation results are given to validate the above theoretical conclusions.