Abstract
Attitude estimation of a floating object is an important elemental technology in on-orbit servicing mission represented by capture of large space debris, such as malfunctioning satellites. This paper presents a particle filter based attitude estimation method for a malfunctioning satellite whose dynamics parameters are unknown and which receives unknown disturbance. In general particle filter method, estimated state values are obtained from the weighted average because state values are independent each other. However, in the representation of the attitude, such as quaternion, each value is not independent. In this paper, Minimum Mean Square Error Approach is applied to obtain estimated quaternion values. The proposed estimation method is verified by numerical simulations.
