Aimed at low accuracy of attitude determination because of using low-cost components which may result in non-linearity in integrated attitude determination systems, a novel attitude determination algorithm using vector observations and gyro measurements is presented. The various features of the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) and optimal-REQUEST (quaternion estimator) algorithms are introduced for attitude determination. An interlaced filtering method is presented for the attitude determination of nano-spacecraft by setting the quaternion as the attitude representation, using the UKF and optimal-REQUEST to estimate the gyro drifts and the quaternion, respectively. The optimal-REQUEST and UKF are not isolated from each other. When the optimal-REQUEST algorithm estimates the attitude quaternion, the gyro drifts are estimated by the UKF algorithm synchronously by using the estimated attitude quaternion. Furthermore, the speed of attitude determination is improved by setting the state dimension to three. Experimental results show that the presented method has higher performance in attitude determination compared to the UKF algorithm and the traditional interlaced filtering method and can estimate the gyro drifts quickly.
