Polarized Skylight Pattern-Based Approach to Attitude Determination

Polarized skylight pattern is one of the earth's natural traits, which can provide compass cues for some insects' navigation. Decades of behavioral and anatomic studies of the mechanisms that insects employed have found that some insects can home unfailingly through detecting the polarized skylight with their sophisticated compound eyes. Largely counting on the natural skylight, their navigation is immune to the interference of external environment and shows advantages in stability and accuracy over the conventional navigating devices, which sheds new light on the detection of skylight polarization pattern for attitude determination since it is the first concern for aerial vehicles to achieve accurate navigation. In this paper, we take the biological research as the guidance to simulate and detect the real-time polarized skylight pattern. In addition, with the polarization data, we are trying to explore a new algorithm to solve the three attitude angles, and test the validity of the algorithm with actual simulation experiment, just aiming at the purpose of finding an unambiguous way of attitude determination.