Thermal biases are the dominate error in low-cost low-power small MEMS gyros. CubeSats often can't afford the power/mass to put a heater on their MEMS gyros and don't have space for a higher-quality gyro. The Nonlinear Adaptive Filters (NAFs) enable precision pointing on CubeSats by eliminating thermal bias (and other) errors. NAFs are also beneficial to larger satellites with higher-quality gyros subjected to rapid thermal changes as NAFs eliminate thermal sensor errors.
The Nonlinear adaptive filters (NAF) can learn deterministic gyro errors and cancel the error's effect from attitude estimates. By completely canceling deterministic gyro errors, NAFs improve sensor performance. The project includes: Simulation of NAF (and comparison to state-of-art); Mathematical analysis to optimize NAF tuning; Development of high-fidelity gyro models, especially modeling thermal effects. Milestones include Simulation Development and Thermal Vacuum Testing with several CubeSat-grade gyros.
More »Organizations Performing Work | Role | Type | Location |
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Lead Organization | NASA Center | Greenbelt, Maryland |
Start: | 2 |
Current: | 3 |
Estimated End: | 3 |
This is a historic project that was completed before the creation of TechPort on October 1, 2012. Available data has been included. This record may contain less data than currently active projects.