Cooperative simultaneous autonomous orbit determination and time synchronization: A distributed factor graph approach

A novel distributed approach based on a factor graph framework, using inter-satellite ranging measurements to achieve simultaneous autonomous orbit determination and time synchronization of networked satellites, is proposed. In order to reduce computation complexity as well as communication overhead considering limited resource constraints onboard, we present a parametric message passing scheme with Gaussian approximation exploiting the geometrical characteristics of inter-satellite measurements. Simulation results show that proposed framework has considerable performance in terms of accuracy and convergence rate.