Star tracker for mobile applications

This paper presents a star tracking algorithm to determine the orientation of aircrafts, spacecrafts and automobiles. Such tracking is especially challenging since it requires robustness and should work continuously and autonomously. A wider view of this problem is utilizing the algorithm on automobiles and aircrafts and predict the device's orientation throughout time from the computed position. The novelty of the proposed framework lies in both the computational efficiency and the ability of the star tracker to cope with noisy measurements and outliers. Both simulator and initial field experiments confirm the benefits of the proposed framework.