Multi-spacecraft collaborative attitude determination of space tumbling target with experimental verification

The precise attitude determination of a tumbling non-cooperative space target is challenging. This paper proposed an attitude determination approach based on multi-spacecraft collaborative observation. The three-dimensional (3-D) point cloud data of the target is constructed in terms of the collaborative observation data. By virtue of the target features and point cloud matching between two adjacent frames, the attitude change information of the target is derived, and based on this, the attitude information of the tumbling target is estimated via Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Numerical simulations and ground micro-gravity experiments are carried out to demonstrate the performance of the proposed collaborative observation method. The results show that the presented approach can successfully estimate the attitude of the tumbling target with no prior information, and avoid the presence of occlusion or data missing during the observation process.