Design and Simulation of Attitude Determination System of ICUBE-1: The First CubeSat of Institute Of Space Technology

This research contribution is drafted to implement Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) as an attitude determination algorithm for NanoSatellite. It is specifically designed for the ICUBE1, the first Cubesat of Institute of Space Technology (IST), Islamabad, Pakistan. The attitude determination and control of any satellite is a stringent requirement for any mission. ICUBE is a picosatellite, presently being developed at Institute of a Space Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan. This project envisages to gain experience in the development of Cubesat and for the technology experiments especially to validate the ADCS of Cubesat. This research is carried out to implement UKF as one of the option for Cubesat. The orbit is nearly circular with 98 degree inclination at an altitude of 700 km for the design purposes. The quaternions are used as the attitude representation parameters, magnetometer and rate gyros are used as the sensors, GPS receiver as an orbital sensor and magnetic coils as the actuators for the ADCS of ICUBE. The Kinematics and dynamics model are developed in the Simulink/Matlab. A high precision orbit propagator (HPOP) is incorporated for orbit propagation. The complete system is simulated with UKF as attitude estimation algorithm to verify the efficiency in terms of convergence, initial conditions variations, memory and time of computation. The algorithm is implemented on the ICUBE model and faster convergence is achieved by using different initial conditions in attitude estimation.

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