Vision-based spacecraft relative navigation using the sparse Gauss-Hermite quadrature filter

In this paper, vision-based relative navigation of two spacecraft is addressed using the sparse Gauss-Hermite quadrature filter. The relative navigation provides the estimation of the relative attitude and relative orbit between spacecraft, which is a challenging filtering problem since it is a highly nonlinear and high dimensional estimation problem. Many filters have been used to solve this problem, such as, the extended Kalman filter (EKF) and the unscented Kalman filter (UKF). However, these filters are not accurate enough when the initial uncertainty is large or the nonlinearity is significant. Moreover, although the conventional Gauss-Hermite quadrature filter is more accurate than the UKF, it cannot be used since a huge number of points is required. It is shown in this paper that the sparse Gauss-Hermite quadrature filter can achieve better estimation accuracy than the EKF, the UKF, and the cubature Kalman filter without excessive computation load.