Filtering Performance Analyizing for Relative Navigation Using Single Difference Carrier-Phase GPS

Satellite formation flying can provide the platform for interferometric observation to acquire the precise data and ensure the flexibility for space mission. This paper presents development and verification of an algorithm to estimate the baseline between formation flying satellites. To estimate a baseline(relative navigation) in real time, EKF(Extended Kalman Filter) and UKF(Unscented Kalman Filter) are used. Measurements for updating a state-vector in Kalman Filter are GPS single difference data. In results, The position errors in estimated baseline are converged to less than +/- 1 m in both EKF and UKF. And as using the two types of Kalman filter, it is clear that the unscented Kalman filter shows a relatively better performance than the extended Kalman filter by comparing an efficiency to the model which has a non-linearity.