Parameter Estimation Based Angular Velocity Observer Design for Rigid-Body Spacecraft

This paper proposes a simple and physically intuitive approach to the angular velocity estimation problem of rigid-body spacecraft. By taking the advantage of the underlying nature of attitude dynamics, the original state observation problem is equivalently transformed into an easily solvable parameter estimation problem, and global exponential convergence of the observation errors is obtained without using high-gain injection. The main design is extremely concise in overall mathematical formulations and allows great flexibility for implementation, its effectiveness and performance improvements under measurement noises are verified through numerical simulations.