A Dynamic Precision Evaluation Method for the Star Sensor in the Stellar-Inertial Navigation System

Integrating the advantages of INS (inertial navigation system) and the star sensor, the stellar-inertial navigation system has been used for a wide variety of applications. The star sensor is a high-precision attitude measurement instrument; therefore, determining how to validate its accuracy is critical in guaranteeing its practical precision. The dynamic precision evaluation of the star sensor is more difficult than a static precision evaluation because of dynamic reference values and other impacts. This paper proposes a dynamic precision verification method of star sensor with the aid of inertial navigation device to realize real-time attitude accuracy measurement. Based on the gold-standard reference generated by the star simulator, the altitude and azimuth angle errors of the star sensor are calculated for evaluation criteria. With the goal of diminishing the impacts of factors such as the sensors’ drift and devices, the innovative aspect of this method is to employ static accuracy for comparison. If the dynamic results are as good as the static results, which have accuracy comparable to the single star sensor’s precision, the practical precision of the star sensor is sufficiently high to meet the requirements of the system specification. The experiments demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.