Noise analysis in satellite attitude estimation using angular rate and a single vector measurement

This paper investigates the effect of noisy measurements of the angular rate in a nonlinear attitude estimator for satellites. The attitude estimator uses measurement of a single attitude sensor such as sun, earth horizon, star tracker or magnetometer together with a rate gyro, and guarantees exponential convergence of the attitude estimation error to zero under no noise condition. This paper presents stochastic and deterministic upper bounds for the attitude estimation error affected by the noise in gyro. A realistic simulation is presented to illustrate the results.