Gyroscope fault accommodation based on dedicated Kalman filters

Abstract

To improve the reliability of the attitude determination system with redundant gyroscopes, this article proposes a gyroscope fault accommodation method using a bank of dedicated Kalman filters. The redundant gyroscopes are divided into several groups and then a dedicated Kalman filter is designed for each group of gyroscopes. The residuals generated by the dedicated Kalman filters indicate the consistency levels between the measurements of the star sensor and the gyroscopes. Based on the estimation results provided by the Kalman filters, a fault accommodation method using online selection strategy is proposed to attenuate the effect of the fault. Numerical simulations are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.