Relative Navigation with Maneuvers Using a Suboptimal Fading Extended Kalman Filtera

Relative navigation is one of the key technologies involved in many spatial missions, including spacecraft formation flight as well as rendezvous and docking. This paper develops an efficient approach of relative orbit determination, especially, the case in which spacecrafts perform unknown maneuvers to change the relative configuration is considered. On the assumption that the inter-spacecraft distance and orientation measurements are available all the time, the orbit states estimation is achieved through a suboptimal fading extended Kalman filter design. The numerical simulation results verify the validity of this navigation approach