Orbital Uncertainty Propagation Based on Adaptive Gaussian Mixture Model under Generalized Equinoctial Orbital Elements

The number of resident space objects (RSOs) has been steadily increasing over time, posing significant risks to the safe operation of on-orbit assets. The accurate prediction of potential collision events and implementation of effective and nonredundant avoidance maneuvers require the precise estima...

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Main Authors: Hui Xie, Tianru Xue, Wenjun Xu, Gaorui Liu, Haibin Sun, Shengli Sun
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-09-01
Series:Remote Sensing
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/15/19/4652
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author Hui Xie
Tianru Xue
Wenjun Xu
Gaorui Liu
Haibin Sun
Shengli Sun
author_facet Hui Xie
Tianru Xue
Wenjun Xu
Gaorui Liu
Haibin Sun
Shengli Sun
author_sort Hui Xie
collection DOAJ
description The number of resident space objects (RSOs) has been steadily increasing over time, posing significant risks to the safe operation of on-orbit assets. The accurate prediction of potential collision events and implementation of effective and nonredundant avoidance maneuvers require the precise estimation of the orbit positions of objects of interest and propagation of their associated uncertainties. Previous research mainly focuses on striking a balance between accurate propagation and efficient computation. A recently proposed approach that integrates uncertainty propagation with different coordinate representations has the potential to achieve such a balance. This paper proposes combining the generalized equinoctial orbital elements (GEqOE) representation with an adaptive Gaussian mixture model (GMM) for uncertainty propagation. Specifically, we implement a reformulation for the orbital dynamics so that the underlying state and the moment feature of the GMM are propagated under the GEqOE coordinates. Starting from an initial Gaussian probability distribution function (PDF), the algorithm iteratively propagates the uncertainty distribution using a detection-splitting module. A differential entropy-based nonlinear detector and a splitting library are utilized to adjust the number of GMM components dynamically. Component splitting is triggered when a predefined threshold of differential entropy is violated, generating several GMM components. The final probability density function (PDF) is obtained by a weighted summation of the component distributions at the target time. Benefiting from the nonlinearity reduction caused by the GEqOE representation, the number of triggered events largely decreases, causing the necessary number of components to maintain uncertainty realism also to decrease, which enables the proposed approach to achieve good performance with much more efficiency. As demonstrated by the results of propagation in three scenarios with different degrees of complexity, compared with the Cartesian-based approach, the proposed approach achieves comparable accuracy to the Monte Carlo method while largely reducing the number of components generated during propagation. Our results confirm that a judicious choice of coordinate representation can significantly improve the performance of uncertainty propagation methods in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency.
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spelling doaj.art-0d9b689aea8b49a4b4dcbfb502f070b52023-11-19T14:58:04ZengMDPI AGRemote Sensing2072-42922023-09-011519465210.3390/rs15194652Orbital Uncertainty Propagation Based on Adaptive Gaussian Mixture Model under Generalized Equinoctial Orbital ElementsHui Xie0Tianru Xue1Wenjun Xu2Gaorui Liu3Haibin Sun4Shengli Sun5Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200083, ChinaShanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200083, ChinaShanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200083, ChinaShanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200083, ChinaShanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200083, ChinaShanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200083, ChinaThe number of resident space objects (RSOs) has been steadily increasing over time, posing significant risks to the safe operation of on-orbit assets. The accurate prediction of potential collision events and implementation of effective and nonredundant avoidance maneuvers require the precise estimation of the orbit positions of objects of interest and propagation of their associated uncertainties. Previous research mainly focuses on striking a balance between accurate propagation and efficient computation. A recently proposed approach that integrates uncertainty propagation with different coordinate representations has the potential to achieve such a balance. This paper proposes combining the generalized equinoctial orbital elements (GEqOE) representation with an adaptive Gaussian mixture model (GMM) for uncertainty propagation. Specifically, we implement a reformulation for the orbital dynamics so that the underlying state and the moment feature of the GMM are propagated under the GEqOE coordinates. Starting from an initial Gaussian probability distribution function (PDF), the algorithm iteratively propagates the uncertainty distribution using a detection-splitting module. A differential entropy-based nonlinear detector and a splitting library are utilized to adjust the number of GMM components dynamically. Component splitting is triggered when a predefined threshold of differential entropy is violated, generating several GMM components. The final probability density function (PDF) is obtained by a weighted summation of the component distributions at the target time. Benefiting from the nonlinearity reduction caused by the GEqOE representation, the number of triggered events largely decreases, causing the necessary number of components to maintain uncertainty realism also to decrease, which enables the proposed approach to achieve good performance with much more efficiency. As demonstrated by the results of propagation in three scenarios with different degrees of complexity, compared with the Cartesian-based approach, the proposed approach achieves comparable accuracy to the Monte Carlo method while largely reducing the number of components generated during propagation. Our results confirm that a judicious choice of coordinate representation can significantly improve the performance of uncertainty propagation methods in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency.https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/15/19/4652orbit uncertainty propagationadaptive Gaussian mixture model (AGMM)generalized equinoctial orbital elements (GEqOE)
spellingShingle Hui Xie
Tianru Xue
Wenjun Xu
Gaorui Liu
Haibin Sun
Shengli Sun
Orbital Uncertainty Propagation Based on Adaptive Gaussian Mixture Model under Generalized Equinoctial Orbital Elements
Remote Sensing
orbit uncertainty propagation
adaptive Gaussian mixture model (AGMM)
generalized equinoctial orbital elements (GEqOE)
title Orbital Uncertainty Propagation Based on Adaptive Gaussian Mixture Model under Generalized Equinoctial Orbital Elements
title_full Orbital Uncertainty Propagation Based on Adaptive Gaussian Mixture Model under Generalized Equinoctial Orbital Elements
title_fullStr Orbital Uncertainty Propagation Based on Adaptive Gaussian Mixture Model under Generalized Equinoctial Orbital Elements
title_full_unstemmed Orbital Uncertainty Propagation Based on Adaptive Gaussian Mixture Model under Generalized Equinoctial Orbital Elements
title_short Orbital Uncertainty Propagation Based on Adaptive Gaussian Mixture Model under Generalized Equinoctial Orbital Elements
title_sort orbital uncertainty propagation based on adaptive gaussian mixture model under generalized equinoctial orbital elements
topic orbit uncertainty propagation
adaptive Gaussian mixture model (AGMM)
generalized equinoctial orbital elements (GEqOE)
url https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/15/19/4652
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AT wenjunxu orbitaluncertaintypropagationbasedonadaptivegaussianmixturemodelundergeneralizedequinoctialorbitalelements
AT gaoruiliu orbitaluncertaintypropagationbasedonadaptivegaussianmixturemodelundergeneralizedequinoctialorbitalelements
AT haibinsun orbitaluncertaintypropagationbasedonadaptivegaussianmixturemodelundergeneralizedequinoctialorbitalelements
AT shenglisun orbitaluncertaintypropagationbasedonadaptivegaussianmixturemodelundergeneralizedequinoctialorbitalelements