Relative Navigation Using Only Intersatellite Range Measurements

摘要

There are a number of emerging and important operational scenarios in which relative navigation using only range measurements may be desirable, such as a formation of spacecraft capable of performing intersatellite ranging over a uhf/vhf communication link. Despite the existence of such scenarios, little published work exists on the problem of range-only relative navigation. The present work explores the observability of range-only relative navigation, and establishes that there are four possible relative trajectories for general three-dimensional motion that will produce exactly the same time history of range measurements. Various special relative orbits can produce other multiplicities of possible relative trajectories, such as two, eight, or infinitely many. After establishing that multiple solutions exist (two, four, eight, or infinitely many), a method for quickly computing these solutions for initial relative-orbit determination is described. The sequential processing of range measurements in an extended Kalman filter is also discussed. The theoretical results are demonstrated through a number of numerical examples.