To diagnose the fault of attitude sensors in satellites, this paper proposes a novel approach based on the Kalman filter of the discrete-time descriptor system. By regarding the sensor fault term as the auxiliary state vector, the attitude measurement system subjected to the attitude sensor fault is modeled by the discrete-time descriptor system. The condition of estimability of such systems is given. And then a Kalman filter of the discrete-time descriptor system is established based on the methodology of the maximum likelihood estimation. With the descriptor Kalman filter, the state vector of the original system and sensor fault can be estimated simultaneously. The proposed method is able to esti-mate an abrupt sensor fault as well as the incipient one. Moreover, it is also effective in the multiple faults scenario. Simulations are conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.
A novel satellite fault diagnosis scheme is presented based on the predictive filter and empirical mode composition(EMD).First,the predictive filter is utilized to obtain the fault estimation,which is corrupted by noise.Then the EMD method is introduced to decompose the fault estimation into a finite number of intrinsic mode functions and extract the trend of faults for fault diagnosis.The proposed scheme has the ability of diagnosing both abrupt and incipient faults of the actuator in a satellite attitude control subsystem.A mathematical simulation is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.