Application of the semi-definite relaxation method to the attitude determination of the rigid body

The method of semi-definite relaxation is applied to the problem of attitude determination of the rigid body with respect to the local horizon using satellite navigation. It is shown how the original nonconvex quadratic programming problem can be merged in a wider class of convex optimization problems that admit an efficient solution. Instead of the original computationally complex problem, a convex problem is solved that gives an approximate solution of the original problem. The proposed approach is applied to the processing of experimental data.