The past decade has been marked by an explosive growth in the number of missions with the use of small spacecraft weighing only about tens of kilograms, including CubeSats that are currently widely employed in various applications. For a scientific paper, it is no longer feasible to enumerate and properly analyze the accomplished missions as well as those under development and being planned: information changes so quickly that perhaps only websites with inline renovations can keep track of all the changes in this market. Near-Earth missions of CubeSats increasingly become the prerogative of engineers and production managers. Nowadays, even factories are built to mass-produce small spacecraft. However, interplanetary small-spacecraft missions stand apart because the technologies used to develop large spacecraft for interplanetary missions are not fully applicable to small spacecraft. The same is true of the bal-listic aspects of such missions. This is primarily due to the low energy capability of small spacecraft for maneuvering and transmitting signals over long distanc-es. The other equally important aspects are their self-sufficiency, navigation support, and radiation resistance in outer space. From the standpoint of the sci-entific novelty of the problems that spacecraft have to face and the fundamen-tals of ballistic implementation, it is interplanetary missions that attract atten-tion of researchers. This paper discusses the opportunities for interplanetary transportation of small spacecraft and formulates the problems that need to be solved in the near future.

This article discusses chances and challenges of using cold atom interferometers in inertial navigation. The error characteristics of the novel sensor are presented, as well as one option for an online estimation of the different readout errors. An extended Kalman filter framework is derived and analysed which uses the readout of the atom interferometer as observation in order to correct several systematic errors of a conventional IMU, allowing for an improved strapdown calculation in an arbitrary target system. The performance gain is discussed analytically based on the steady state variances of the filter, as well as on the example of a simulated scenario for Earth orbit satellites. The correction of the conventional IMU errors is further demonstrated in an experiment under laboratory conditions with a higher class sensor emulating an atom interferometer. While the application of the novel technology as a gyroscope is still limited, as pointed out in the paper, the presented framework yields options for a full six degree of freedom operation of the atom interferometer.

The paper is devoted to the current problem of gyroscopy in general and its magneto-optical laser branch in particular: further increase in the accuracy of gyroscopes while maintaining their stable operation in real operating conditions. The problem is considered and studied by the example of the magneto-optical Zeeman laser gyroscope, which is one of the effective types of laser gyroscope. The development and improvement of the technology for creating this type of gyroscopes makes it possible to significantly re-duce the sources of the gyroscope zero drift and yet, retain the other properties and performance parameters. The study and validation of the possibility of a significant reduction in the gyroscope key control currents, such as the pumping currents of the active medium and the control currents of frequency bias, will increase the measuring accuracy of the gyroscope, and, accordingly, the accuracy of navigation systems based on them.

In the first part of the paper, a polynomial filter is proposed for filtering under quadratic nonlinearities both in the system and measurement equations. The second part details its features and advantages over the extended Kalman filter and illustrates them using a methodological example and navigation data processing.

In the first part of the paper, a polynomial filter is proposed for filtering under quadratic nonlinearities both in the system and measurement equations. The second part details its features and advantages over the extended Kalman filter and illustrates them using a methodological example and navigation data processing.

A robust and accurate real-time navigation system is crucial for autonomous robotics. In particular, GNSS denied and poor visual conditions are still very challenging as vision based approaches tend to fail in darkness, direct sunlight, fog or smoke. Therefore, we are taking advantage of inertial data and FMCW radar sensors as both are not affected by such conditions. In this work, we propose a framework, which uses several 4D mm Wave radar sensors simultaneously. The extrinsic calibration of each radar sensor is estimated online. Based on a single radar scan, the 3D ego velocity and optionally yaw measurements based on Manhattan world assumptions are fused. An extensive evaluation with real world datasets is presented. We achieve even better accuracies than state of the art stereo Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) while being able to cope with degraded visual conditions and requiring only very little computational resources.

The paper studies the possibility of updating the parameters of error model of a rotating inertial measurement unit (IMU) with fiber-optic gyroscopes (FOG) in a strapdown inertial navigation system (SINS) under operating conditions. The IMU is placed in a two-axis gimbal for modulation rotation. The main focus is made on the estimation of scale factor errors of the FOG and accelerometers, non-orthogonality of their sensitive axes, and relative time delays (group delays) of inertial sensors during the IMU normal rotation according to the navigation solution of the INS in the observation mode of its operation. Also, the paper presents the description and results of estimation of so-called rhumb drifts of the IMU, which may occur due to the perturbing forces associated with the geographical axes or the axes of the system central device body.The research is based on the results of FOG-based INS simulation.

Resonant modes of motion, manifested as a significant increase in the oscillation amplitude of the spatial angle of attack, can result in the failure of the CubeSat mission. This paper is concerned with the study of the resonant motion modes of aerodynamically stabilized CubeSat nanosatellites in low circular orbits with small inertia and mass asymmetry. In contrast to axisymmetric bodies of rotation, resonances in CubeSat nanosatellites can be caused not only by small asymmetry, but they also arise due to the form factor of the rectangular parallelepiped. Formulas have been obtained to determine the critical values of the nanosatellite longitudinal angular velocity at which the conditions for the emergence of resonant motion modes are fulfilled. An approach is proposed to prevent possible resonances for CubeSat nanosatellites.

The paper describes an interferometric fiber-optic gyroscope (IFOG) of a new configuration, i.e., with a birefringence modulator (IFOG-BRM) is proposed. According to the proposed scheme, a prototype model of the device has been assembled and tested to estimate its drift on a stationary base. Dependence of the IFOG-BRM drift on the temperature has been determined. According to the test results, the error of angular rate estimation is 0.05 deg/h; however, high sensitivity of the device to the absolute temperature variations has been revealed.