Quaternion Based Attitude Determination Method of Cubature Kalman Filter

This paper considers the nonlinear attitude filtering problem of rigid spacecraft in the presence of model uncertainty. In order to improve the attitude accuracy and the filtering stability, we use the cubature Kalman filter technique to design the attitude estimator and employ it to estimate the attitude information of a rigid spacecraft. The key point of the cubature Kalman filter method is to calculate the multi-dimensional Gauss integral by the third-order cubature integral law. We propose a quaternion-based cubature Kalman filter approach and prove the feasibility of it by using the root mean square error method. Finally, simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.