A long-range autonomous navigation method for lunar rovers

According to the lunar exploration mission requirements, this paper proposes a new long-range autonomous navigation method for lunar rovers. The method establishes the equation for the attitude, velocity and position error of an inertia navigation system in the lunar environment based on the theories of inertial navigation and astronomy, and then constracts the observation model based on celestial triangle expressions and velocity error. Because the system equation and the observation model are linear, the Kalman filter is used to implement the optimization estimation in this method. The simulation results demonstrate that this method has the higher precision of position and head angle, and show its reliability, validity and feasibility.