Title: Bacterial foraging based moon symmetry axis estimation for spacecraft attitude determination

Authors: Liyong Ma; Qi Wang; Jiachen Ma

Addresses: Department of Automatic Measurement and Control, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China; School of Information and Electrical Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Weihai, China ' Department of Automatic Measurement and Control, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China ' School of Information and Electrical Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Weihai, China

Abstract: Accurate vehicle attitude is critical for spacecraft in the navigation and control applications. Moon-sun attitude sensor is a stand alone configuration attitude sensor to get accurate attitude from body measurements and known reference observations. Inspired by the foraging behaviour of bacteria, the bacterial foraging algorithm reaches global minima by employing chemotaxis, swarming, reproduction and elimination and dispersal events. In this paper, we developed a bacterial foraging optimisation based symmetry axis estimation method from observed moon image for moon-sun attitude sensor. After the pre-processing of the source image which includes filtering and segmentation steps, bacterial foraging is applied to the segmented image for searching symmetry axis of the illuminated moon with a developed object function. The offset distance and rotation angle are used as optimisation parameters for symmetry axis estimation. The experimental results show that the proposed method is efficient for the symmetry axis estimation of moon image.

Keywords: bacterial foraging; spacecraft attitude determination; symmetry axis estimation; moon-sun attitude sensors; swarm optimisation; spacecraft control; spacecraft navigation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2013.054356

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2013 Vol.47 No.2/3, pp.249 - 255

Published online: 05 Jun 2013 *

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