Research on satellite selection and search strategy of constellation autonomous navigation

Along with the development of the second generation of Beidou navigation system and the research on the main navigation system in the world, goes the hot interest on the research of autonomous navigation of constellation. The selection and search strategy of the constellation directly influence the performance of the autonomous navigation. In this paper, the autonomous orbit determination and the autonomous time synchronization with the proposed the selection and search strategy is explored, which based on the dual-directional range measurement. Considering the engineering practice that each satellite is equipped with numbers of antennas, the method of determining the dual-directional visibility and the optimal satellite selection strategy are explored. Using this strategy, each satellite can get the best satellite combination which has the best geometry according to the current positioning satellite. For the whole constellation’s satellite selection, the search strategy is designed to make each member satellite can get equal chance to get its best satellite combination. In order to demonstrate the validity of the strategy, the autonomous navigation based on two situations including none limit of antenna situation and fixed number of antenna situation are simulated. It is concluded that with fixed number of antenna which directly decrease the measurement number the autonomous navigation process can still make a fast convergence and achieve the expected navigation precision. In one word, the simulation results validate the correctness of proposed scheme.