Laplace ℓ₁ robust Student’s T-filter for attitude estimation of satellites

A Laplace ℓ₁ robust student’s T-filter is presented for satellites to estimate their attitude state despite severe measurement noise and modeling error. Although the student’s T-filter (STF) has the capability of handling measurement noise, it cannot address the unknown modeling error. It is further sensitive to the degree of freedom (DOF). Hence, the measurement covariance is updated by using the maximum correntropy criterion to accommodate the covariance of unknown modeling error in robust filtering design. Moreover, the Laplace distribution is derived to reduce the influence of the DOF parameter by forming a surrogate function of an optimization problem. Then, the majorization minimization approach is formulated to solve such an optimization problem and present the proposed filtering algorithm in the STF framework. Numerical simulation of applying the proposed attitude estimation scheme is performed by comparing it with the third/fifth-order cubature Kalman filters.