Attitude Determination Based on Location of Astronomical Markers With Skylight Polarization Pattern

Many social insects, such as desert ant and honeybees, are able to utilize the natural skylight polarization information for navigation, which has advantages in immunity to the interference of external environment and thus shows higher stability and accuracy. Inspired by it, we attempt to explore a new bionic method for attitude determination by use of polarization pattern. In practice, we first capture the polarization data and based on it, to figure out the location of the sun through clustering. Then, with respect to the relatively consistent spatio-temporal relation between the sun and the zenith, the location of the zenith is accordingly determined. The coordinate of the zenith is adopted to establish the attitude rotation matrix and by which to work out the vehicle's attitude. Finally, we set up a simulation vehicle platform to test the effectiveness of the approach with the theoretical polarization pattern derived from the Rayleigh single-scattering theory and actually detected pattern by the polarization analyzer.