Nanosat processes low-price, shot development cycle and high integration which presents an important of field of the aerospace. nanosat attitude determination is a significant part of the satellite. The accuracy of the attitude determination system has a strong relationship with the hardware and the algorithm of the attitude determination system. This paper is based on SandroidSat-1 attitude determining system. The paper give the studies of how to design an attitude determination system of the nanoSat which is including measurement models, the algorithm design of the filter and the experiments and the experiments show that the system is feasible to nanosat. The main research works of this paper are as follows:

1.      A comprehensive and systematic summary of several types the coordinate systems which are used in both in space and smartphones. Then the paper gives the conversion relationships among the commonly used coordinate systems. A more comprehensive and systematic summary of attitude description method which presented by the direction cosine matrix, the quaternion and Euler angle and the conversion relationship are given. The common attitude determination algorithms and their application scenarios are summarized, and the advantages and disadvantages of various algorithms are analyzed. A comprehensive analysis of the sensors is applied to the attitude determination system of SandroidSat-1.

2.      In the linear assumption, the paper give a design of the SandroidSat-1 attitude determination system which is consist of gyroscope, accelerometer and GPS of an android smartphone. We also give the observation model and the error model of the attitude determination. By using kalman Filter, ground tests show that the output attitude accuracy can reach a moderate level of low earth orbit nanosat attitude determination system.

3.      In the nonlinear assumption, the paper gives a design of the SandroidSat-1 attitude determination system which is consist of gyroscope and accelerometer and magnetometer of an android smartphone. This combination consumes limited satellite resources, relying on the powerful computing and storage capacity of mobile phone, and processed by extending kalman filter, the attitude can meet the requirements of the low earth orbit nanosat’s medium precision demands under the nonlinear assumption.

4.      This paper give an integrated adaptive attitude determination system design by using the fuzzy strategy with the experience of experts as fuzzy rules which is coming from different space environment. The system can chose the more efficient combination of the sensors under different environments. Processing by an extended kalman filter, the accuracy of the system are increased. The simulation experiments show that the system can meet the requirements of the demands of nanosat.