Abstract: Traditional algorithm for the determination of relative position and attitude between target spacecraft and tracking spacecraft of RVD is to obtain the direction cosine matrix and translation vector respectively, but this method can not hold the integrity of the rigid body motion, and also, the solving speed and convergence influence the realtime characteristic and the accuracy of the measurement. This paper proposed a new algorithm based on dualquaternion to overcome the disadvantage of the traditional method. The integrity of the relative rotation and translation between the two coordinates is considered. At last, the simulation results show the effectiveness of the new algorithm.

Key words:  spacecraft, rendezvous and docking, relative position and attitude, dualquaternion, vision measure