Effectiveness of Attitude Estimation Processing Approaches in Tolerating Radiation Soft Errors

This article compares the radiation-induced soft-error tolerance effectiveness of five different attitude estimation (AE) processing approaches that are classically used in inertial navigation systems (INSs) of autonomous things. Results of 14-MeV neutron and thermal neutron radiation testing campaigns indicate that all the AE processing approaches investigated can be critically perturbed by single-event upsets (SEUs), yielding inappropriate output data that would place INS unavailable for a while. Moreover, the radiation testing results also suggest the Kalman filter (KF)-based AE approaches presented better effectivenesses in tolerating SEUs than AE approaches based on gradient descent.