Decentralized X-ray pulsar-based navigation system for space-borne gravitational wave detector

In this paper, the inter-satellite link (ISL) aided X-ray pulsar-based navigation (XPNAV) system is studied to improve the survivability of space-borne gravitational wave detector. An unscented transform (UT) based distributed Kalman estimator is proposed for state estimation within less computational and communication costs. Three different navigation scenarios are designed based on a typical large-scale distributed heliocentric orbital space-borne gravitational wave detector, Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Simulation results show that the positioning root-mean-square error (RMSE) reduces  ̃28% after introducing the ISL to XPNAV. Moreover, the proposed distributed Kalman estimator and the classical Kalman estimator shows similar performance in XPNAV/ISL integrated navigation system with the positioning RMSE of  ̃528m and  ̃520m, respectively. Compared with the classical method, both analytical and simulating analyses demonstrate that the proposed algorithm efficiently reduces the computational costs to 1/N2 for a team with N agents and avoids additional communication needs simultaneously. The efficient distributed Kalman estimator-based XPNAV/ISL integrated navigation provides a high-performance autonomous navigation solution for interplanetary spacecraft formation flying missions.