Adaptive Nonlinear Huber-Based Navigation for Rendezvous in Elliptical Orbit

This paper discusses the development of an adaptive discrete-time robust nonlinear filtering technique, and the application of this technique to the six-degree-of-freedom elliptical orbit rendezvous and docking problem. The proposed adaptive nonlinear filtering technique is based on a robust modification of the divided-difference filtering method based on Huber's generalized maximum likelihood estimation, blended with a robust covariance matching procedure based on a modified Myers-Tapley method. In particular, the adaptive scheme can estimate the process noise and measurement noise covariance matrices along with the state estimate and state estimate error covariance matrix, which uses a robust approach to estimating these covariances that can resist the effects of outliers in the stored buffer of residuals.